Facebook is purging its site of people it thinks have made up names. However the outfit is finding that people really do have daft names and it is killing off real customers whose only sin has been parents who had a similar problem.

The press has focused on the case of Alicia Istanbul who was locked out from her 330 friends, including many she had no other way of contacting, but also from the pages she had set up for the jewelry design business she runs from her Atlanta-area home. Instabul said that Facebook should have asked before it switched her off.  Istanbul, whose father is from the city of Istanbul in Turkey, said it took three weeks to get her account reinstated. Ironically if she was called Constantinople or Byzantine, which was what the city used to be called she would have got away with it.

While some names, like Batman, you would think would be obvious. But we went to school with a bloke called Batman, along with a guy called Badcock and another called Love. Apparently now that Susan Boyle has become an overnight singing sensation it is hard to register that name too, although we went to Journalism school with a Susan Boyle.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt acknowledged that Facebook does make mistakes on occasion, and he apologized for "any inconvenience" which is what PR people say to fill the space in a sentence between the word stuff up and a full stop. Once the site disables an account it deems fake, its holder has to contact Facebook to prove it is real. In some cases, the company may require that the person fax a copy of a government-issued ID, which Facebook says it destroys as soon as the account is verified.

However a large number have got through the net. There are 20 "I.P. Freely" accounts and 13 "Seymour Butts."