Banished from the Garden of Facebook, a 21st Century Tale

By Stormy Shippy, CITC Computer Support Specialist, Communications Services

A fly on the wall overheard this recent exchange between a friend and me:

"Did you delete your Facebook account?"

"No. Why?"

"I can't find you on Facebook at all."

"Weird. I'll check it out..."

My friend was right. He couldn't find me on Facebook. No one could. I had been banished from the Garden of Facebook. Someone or something had said that I was no longer allowed entrance. Reason: unknown.

Two weeks later, Rufus, a member of Facebook's User Operations team kindly broke the news: "Fake names are a violation of our Terms of Use." I let Rufus know that while I am glad Facebook takes great pains to model the real world identity of its users, the truth is, Stormy Shippy is my real name. Rufus promptly let me back into the Garden.

When the dust settled, the reason was not scandalous, but more humorous. However, it raised a handful of questions in my mind: some about Facebook, some about social networks, and some about our society shaped by increasing connectedness.

Facebook

Facebook's mission is to: "make the world more open and connected." Lofty, but that has been my personal experience with the service. Until my fake real name incident that is.

I was never told how Facebook came to the conclusion that my name was fake. Did another user suspect my name and then report my profile? Are there users that actually do that sort of thing? Did an algorithm of 'name correctness' determine to a certain probability that my real name was not real enough? Is there an employee at Facebook that browses names and suspends accounts on a gut feeling? Could an employee with a grudge randomly and without recourse block access?

If my profile had just been created, I might understand. If I had no friends and was doing spam related activity, that's valid. But, no, by any standard I am an upstanding Facebook citizen. I have years of service under my belt. I have hundreds of 'friends' who are implying by their connection with me that I am who I say I am. I co-organized a conference in Dallas for Facebook Developers. I paid $250 to attend Facebook's f8 conference in San Francisco (what percentage of users have paid Facebook anything?). I am friends with Facebook employees.

Is Facebook truly living up to their mission if they take such drastic measures against obviously legitimate users? Not in my mind. There are many paths Facebook could have taken and still been in alignment with their mission. One path would be to put in a process that notifies a user that Facebook thinks an account is potentially using a Fake Name and then provide a mechanism and time frame to provide justification and/or proof of legitimacy. If a user doesn't comply, disable the account. Simple?

Social Networks

In hindsight, it is only appropriate that the notification of my disabled access to the largest social network in the world came directly through a friend. It proves that the real, true social network still functions like it always has. What a relief!

To be clear, Facebook is using technology to model and extend the social network that each of us takes part in every day. Not some alternate reality. They are not alone. They are competing in a race by many companies to capture the identity and attention of every individual on the planet.

Social networks are changing too. The latest evolutions have just been rolled out. Where once you would visit a particular social networking website, now you are able to take your identity and connections to the Internet at large. An example would be visiting CNN and leaving a comment on a news story. No longer will you have to register to make a comment. You will be able to use your Facebook identity to leave one. Your comment will be pushed back out as a story in your news feed. From there all of your friends will then be able to discover your activity around the web. With your permission of course. The walled gardens are opening up.

Facebook calls this 'Facebook Connect', Google calls it 'Friend Connect', and MySpace has dubbed their effort MyspaceID. In total, it is often called the social web. As you can imagine, the stakes are large. The amount of personal data generated is massive, very specific, and goes into tuning advertising systems that are potentially more relevant to the user. And advertisers pay for higher relevance.

If social networks are branching out to all aspects of online life, what happens when you put your identity all in one basket? Can you afford to be left out from participating for weeks at a time when a company decides you aren't real? Can you afford not to participate in these networks if that is what the web evolves into? Is it right for a company to ban people with very little recourse? It appears that for all the benefits of centralized control come all the downsides.

But wait! The story of the web so far has been one of technologies that are fundamentally open which end up winning in the long run. Case in point: is anyone using America Online keywords any longer? So it should come as no surprise that there are already many proposed and early workings of a social web where you are in control of your identity and social relationships. They are found in open standards like OpenID and OAuth and talked about using terms such as 'Data Portability'.

Connectedness

Where is the REAL importance in all this? If a user disappears from the social network forest, will anyone care? After all, if social network technology promises to connect the world and make it a more open place, being disconnected should cause some sort of disturbance. My friends definitely recognized my absence, made it known, and were surprisingly upset that they could not connect with me in the ways they had grown accustomed. That tells me there is importance there. Our relationships were still the same, just harder to see. The beauty of the social web is it can transcend geography and time and keep relationships at the click of a button. Some could argue that my friends should have just picked up the phone and called, but that too is also a form of social network technology.

We aren't relying on the social web to keep us connected, just using it to strengthen and accelerate what is already there. You can live without it. I did for a few weeks and am still here to tell the tale. Do you want to live without it? To each their own. The moral of my story, however, is you don't want to not have the option of participating or have it abruptly taken away from you by those in charge of the system. The only way to ensure that doesn't happen is to know the options and then control your own identity in a truly open social web.

Stormy Shippy is a real boy. Don't let Facebook fool you.