Facebook Running Aggressive and Confusing Censorship

After Facebook finally managed to solve the bug leading to ban of the word “Palestinian” from page titles, it suddenly appeared to be not their only trouble. The news is that now people can’t use the last name "Arab" for opening accounts, because the system prevents them from doing so.

Recently, Professor Brynen from the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet made an attempt to create a Facebook page for his group. Surprisingly, he found himself unable to do so, because the system prevented him from it by a rogue moderating process banning the word "Palestinian" from being used in page titles. After being notified about the trouble, Facebook fixed it and even apologized to Rex Brynen, explaining that they use an automated system, which is designed in such a way that it checks for inaccurate registration names. It happened so that for a short period of time, that system was inadvertently applied to Page creation names as well. Facebook moved to fix the bug immediately after getting an alert to this. It’s working properly now and the service apologized for inconveniences it has caused.

However, recently it happened that Facebook's troubles with Arabic names didn't end over there. Facebook's user faced the similar problem when tried to change her account to her married name – "Arab," which is actually a very common Palestinian last name. After the first attempt the service prevented her from doing so.

The interesting thing is that her husband did succeed in using his real last name back in 2007, when signing up for Facebook for the first time. However, after he changed his last name to Arabic script just for fun some time ago, he found himself unable to change it back to the Roman alphabet later. The couple’s family members have tried to sign up for the service and faced the same trouble. Those who try to set up dummy accounts using "Arab" for the last name also ran into exactly the same problem.

Most probably, the nature of the problem is the same as that of the word "Palestinian" – the reason is overzealous automated system. In spite of the fact that Facebook does have a record of passive-aggressive censorship, it can hardly be imagined to be involved in the business of preventing prospective consumers from registering. However, Arab family emailed Facebook a number of times, and still hasn’t got any response.

Of course, it wouldn’t be difficult for the company to fix this problem too, but it shouldn't have been a trouble in the first place.