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My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

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Re: My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

#51
post #39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I did not read that as inciting violence or discrimination against my whitebread self. So I don't think it's hate speech. I think, as Wikipedia says [1], "The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social, political, and financial power in the United States. It describes a group whose family wealth, education, status, and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few…

However, many other traditions are much more restrictive regarding personal names[1]. Some countries require the names to be gender specific. So blaming protestants from the British isles (and their American relations) is quite misplaced and inaccurate. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

You seem to be arguing with something nobody said. There's no assertion that WASPs are the only people in the world to have ever decided that one sort of naming convention is normal.

What is being said is that our particular notion of names comes out of that WASP tradition. (Which, if you'll take 30 seconds to read Wikipedia, has important class and wealth connotations.) And therefore it doesn't apply perfectly to an extremely diverse society of immigrants, one with a long history of cultural, religious, and social experimentation.

It's an accident of history that a dominant strain in our culture is "protestants from the British isles". But it's still a pretty important accident. It leaves a mark. We still call that part of the country "New England", for example.

Re: My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

#52

Could Facebook implement a PageRank type algorithm that gets people with already verified real names (perhaps they paid for something by credit card on FB, or are registered with a .edu email that matches their initials), to then say whether their friends name was real? Surely there's a way of proving someone's real name without making them use their legal name.

I wonder if they simply want the legal name. If part of the purpose of Facebook is to sell networks of people to marketers, then being able to tie your network identity to your home loan, car loan, and credit score is going to be very appealing.

If we take the article at face value, then the answer is that "no, they don't want your full name" for marketing.

Re: My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

#53
post #40
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, many other traditions are much more restrictive regarding personal names[1]. Some countries require the names to be gender specific. So blaming protestants from the British isles (and their American relations) is quite misplaced and inaccurate. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

Forget what the article says, about some people not even being allowed to use their own names — what's really important here is that we not write anything that remotely sounds like blaming white people.

Amen. Even as a white guy I'm getting tired of Fragile Whiteness Syndrome [1]. Just pointing in the direction of the source of the standards that Facebook is enforcing and we're suddenly off to the races.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...

Re: My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site

#54
post #6

Summary: Facebook has an overly rigid process governing names and this guy has an edge-case problem. Is this not a solved issue? How do women who change their name upon marriage use Facebook? Does Facebook recognize legal name changes? Is that not in effect here?

It says something that my comment is getting downvoted, though I'm not sure what. Is it sensitivity to saying scenarios that are statistical anomalies "edge-cases"?
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