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.