Summary of the worrying news (along with my commentary):
Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, defends the name policy that "affected" our LGBT community. Yes, we've been "affected" by their uneven enforcement of the policy that bans names they deem unreal or "not real enough." Facebook chose to support those who report non-gender-conforming accounts, or people who report someone's account as unreal in response to them not liking what their opponent said in an online debate. Meanwhile, plenty of fake-named accounts that look like everyday gender-conforming men and women and don't post controversial topics will never get banned from this policy.
Cox stood by the original "real name" policy — which Facebook says is not synonymous with requiring "legal" names. He said the rule helps Facebook stand out amid all the anonymity online and helps keep users safe from anonymous cyberbullying.
"With this input, we're already underway building better tools for "authenticating" the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors." (Sister Roma is the famous Drag Queen shown above. When her Facebook account was threatened, she got her friend San Francisco City Supervisor David Campos to complain to Facebook, which is probably the only reason Facebook is even pretending to listen to the queer community on this issue.)
You heard it here first, folks. The way Facebook enforces their new name policy is meant to KEEP USERS SAFE FROM BULLYING.
It's not like any of us use aliases to protect ourselves from bullying, right? It's not like any women, transgender people or LGBQ folk have ever been threatened over something we published on the internet. It's especially not like people like Anita Sarkeesian are all over the news for exactly this sort of trouble.
Meanwhile, Ello is gaining 4,000 users per hour...
Few things make me 'tinfoil up' more than the big social networks.
ReplyDeleteEven if you avoid these social networks completely, if you have friends and family that use them and they happen to mention you from time to time over the years that's essentially them semi-inadvertently uploading years worth your personal data onto some companies servers for all time/until something bad happens to said servers. Now consider that company insider's, computer crackers, crawler's/phishers using spoof profiles and any organisation's/individuals willing to give money to such people could all potentially gain access to that data and you'll be hitting why they miff me so. Then of course there are organisations with billions in their budgets to think about, such as the 'all' seeing and still partially blind: 'They who must not be named for their name is one of their trigger words, probably.'