Facebook has blocked a female user bearing the same name of as the terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for last week’s attack in Paris.
Suggesting that her Facebook profile was blocked because of her name, Isis Anchalee, an engineer based in San Francisco, complained on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon that her Facebook account had been disabled.
“Why would you disable my personal account? MY REAL NAME IS ISIS ANCHALEE /facepalm,” she tweeted at Facebook.
The message thread that Isis and one her friends had on Facebook has been marked as spam, said one of Isis’s Facebook friends.
“Facebook thinks I’m a terrorist and froze my account,” she replied.
She sad she sent Facebook a screenshot of her passport, proving that her birth name was Isis.
A Facebook researcher, Omid Farivar, tweeted at Anchalee publicly to apologize eight hours after her initial complaint on Tuesday.
“Isis, sorry about this. I don’t know what happened. I’ve reported it to the right people and we’re working on fixing it,” wrote the Facebook researcher.
A policy requiring people to use their real names was enforced earlier this year by Facebook. Users are asked to refrain from adding symbols, punctuation, unusual characters, professional or religious titles, or “offensive or suggestive words of any kind” to their names to “keep our community safe”.
But Nadia Drake wrote in Wired in June that the execution of that policy has been uneven.
“Part of the motivation is stopping the proliferation of celebrity imposter accounts and profiles made for pets. But it’s also allowed Facebook to shutter the accounts of real people, based on ‘authenticity’. What does ‘authentic’ mean, though? It’s both confusing and contextual, because identity itself is confusing and contextual,” she wrote.
“Despite those complexities, Facebook believes it can determine authenticity for you,” she added in the note.
Neither Anchalee nor Farivar responded to requests for comment by the media.
“I just wanted my account back ,” Anchalee said to a reporter from Tech Insider adding that she wanted to avoid a “media storm” over the issue.
Days earlier, Anchalee had vented her frustration with ride-sharing service drivers’ remarks about her name.
An online petition calling for media to “stop calling terrorists [Islamic State] by our name” closed on 24 August with more than 56,800 signatures.
Women named Isis were “facing the unnecessary backlash of this irresponsible choice by the media”, said the founder, Isis Martinez of Miami, Florida.
“We are grateful for the response and coverage we have received from the media, but most media outlets continue to desecrate our name and even go as far as misquoting the president of the United States saying Isis, when he only refers to the terror group as Isil. Please sign and help the thousands of women and little girls named Isis who are suffering from this backlash caused by the media. Help us take back our name,” Martinez said.
Martinez quit Facebook in January after the Twitter page of the United States Central Command, part of the country’s military, was hacked by a group claiming to represent Isis.
In recent times however the term Daesh has been used by some world leaders, including François Hollande and US president Barrack Obama, to refer to Isis. Daesh is an anglicised version of the acronym Isis when written in Arabic.
Again, this term that is being used by some world leaders also bear close resemblance to the word daes, meaning “someone or something that crushes”.
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
Suggesting that her Facebook profile was blocked because of her name, Isis Anchalee, an engineer based in San Francisco, complained on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon that her Facebook account had been disabled.
“Why would you disable my personal account? MY REAL NAME IS ISIS ANCHALEE /facepalm,” she tweeted at Facebook.
The message thread that Isis and one her friends had on Facebook has been marked as spam, said one of Isis’s Facebook friends.
“Facebook thinks I’m a terrorist and froze my account,” she replied.
She sad she sent Facebook a screenshot of her passport, proving that her birth name was Isis.
A Facebook researcher, Omid Farivar, tweeted at Anchalee publicly to apologize eight hours after her initial complaint on Tuesday.
“Isis, sorry about this. I don’t know what happened. I’ve reported it to the right people and we’re working on fixing it,” wrote the Facebook researcher.
A policy requiring people to use their real names was enforced earlier this year by Facebook. Users are asked to refrain from adding symbols, punctuation, unusual characters, professional or religious titles, or “offensive or suggestive words of any kind” to their names to “keep our community safe”.
But Nadia Drake wrote in Wired in June that the execution of that policy has been uneven.
“Part of the motivation is stopping the proliferation of celebrity imposter accounts and profiles made for pets. But it’s also allowed Facebook to shutter the accounts of real people, based on ‘authenticity’. What does ‘authentic’ mean, though? It’s both confusing and contextual, because identity itself is confusing and contextual,” she wrote.
“Despite those complexities, Facebook believes it can determine authenticity for you,” she added in the note.
Neither Anchalee nor Farivar responded to requests for comment by the media.
“I just wanted my account back ,” Anchalee said to a reporter from Tech Insider adding that she wanted to avoid a “media storm” over the issue.
Days earlier, Anchalee had vented her frustration with ride-sharing service drivers’ remarks about her name.
An online petition calling for media to “stop calling terrorists [Islamic State] by our name” closed on 24 August with more than 56,800 signatures.
Women named Isis were “facing the unnecessary backlash of this irresponsible choice by the media”, said the founder, Isis Martinez of Miami, Florida.
“We are grateful for the response and coverage we have received from the media, but most media outlets continue to desecrate our name and even go as far as misquoting the president of the United States saying Isis, when he only refers to the terror group as Isil. Please sign and help the thousands of women and little girls named Isis who are suffering from this backlash caused by the media. Help us take back our name,” Martinez said.
Martinez quit Facebook in January after the Twitter page of the United States Central Command, part of the country’s military, was hacked by a group claiming to represent Isis.
In recent times however the term Daesh has been used by some world leaders, including François Hollande and US president Barrack Obama, to refer to Isis. Daesh is an anglicised version of the acronym Isis when written in Arabic.
Again, this term that is being used by some world leaders also bear close resemblance to the word daes, meaning “someone or something that crushes”.
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
