Istanbul, not Constantinople
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."