When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds his Townhall Q&A in New Delhi on October 28, there is one question I would like him to answer: Will he, please, scrap Facebook’s ‘real names’ policy?
As it happens, I can personally vouch for its discriminatory nature, not to mention its breathtaking stupidity. Three weeks ago, Facebook locked me out of my account. Apparently, someone had reported my name as fake. Unless I submitted documentation which proved that I was me, and that my name was my real name, I could not access my account, ever.
It was then that I discovered that this has been going on for a while. Scores of journalists, writers, activists, political dissidents, LGBTQ persons, and many vulnerable groups of people from around the world have been victimised by Facebook’s absurd ‘real names’ policy and its arbitrary enforcement. Like me, they all woke up one morning to find that could not access their Facebook accounts. Their contacts, photos, status updates, messages, followers, data — all gone.
If a government body, or even a private company, were to do something like this, you could maybe visit a local office. Or call customer care. But with Facebook, there was nothing you could do except wait for their mails and follow their orders.
Coercive enforcement For the record, Facebook has had this ‘real names’ policy right from the beginning. But its enforcement had been selective, and based on reporting by users.
Of late, the company has been more coercive about this policy. This could be because its users have been quick to report ‘pseudonyms’ of members they don’t like for whatever reason. But I suspect there might be other, rather mercenary, reasons: one, pressure to guarantee to its advertisers that all of its 1.4 billion profiles are ‘authentic’; and two, arm-twist users into surrendering high value, government-validated data about themselves.
So this is how it plays out. Say you don’t like someone’s status updates. And say her profile doesn’t have what seems like a regular name. Maybe it has a dictionary-listed word in it – as mine did. You can report it to Facebook as a pseudonymous profile. The more the number of users who report a given profile, the more likely it is that Facebook will block it and notify the user, asking her to submit documentation that authenticates her profile name as the one she uses in real life. Until she does so, and unless Facebook accepts her identity proofs as valid (too often it doesn’t), she’ll remain locked out of her account.
This policy of Facebook’s has been a boon for authoritarian governments seeking to silence dissent without attracting the attendant bad press. Typically, they employ a mob of trolls who report dissident profiles — which are necessarily pseudonymous for safety reasons — as fake, prompting Facebook to shut them down. The most successful of such mobs is the pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which has eliminated several alternative voices on the ongoing conflict in Syria (http://tinyurl.com/ksmw8eg).
Facebook has similarly shut down dissident or marginal political voices in Vietnam, Russia, Egypt, China, Honduras, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and of course, India, as well. When anti-caste activist Preetha G.P. was attacked by a mob of trolls, Facebook reacted by suspending her account and forcing her to reveal her caste surname (http://tinyurl.com/opmrnks).
A substantial number of those victimized by this policy are LGBTQ and trans-gender people living in countries where alternative sexualities are criminalised and/or stigmatised. They had found a haven of sorts in Facebook, where they used pseudonyms to bond with others like themselves. But Facebook’s policy has either locked many of them out or publicised their legal names and gender — putting their lives in danger. Other vulnerable groups unjustly targeted by Facebook’s policy include Native Americans, stalking survivors, and domestic violence survivors.
In response to all these abuses, on October 5, 2015, a coalition of more than 70 human rights organisations wrote a letter to Facebook, asking it to either scrap its ‘real names’ policy or amend it suitably. This coalition — which calls itself the Nameless Coalition — includes groups such as Human Rights Watch, American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Free Women Writers of Afghanistan, among others.
Terming Facebook’s ‘real names’ policy as “culturally biased and technically flawed,” the letter states that it “exposes its users to danger, disrespects the identities of its users, and curtails free speech.” The letter charges Facebook with a “policy of excluding users in a discriminatory manner”, adding that “under international human rights standards, companies have a responsibility to respect human rights and to provide remedies for any abuses they cause or contribute to”.
Identity controlled
Coming back to my own experience, my initial reaction to being locked out was – good riddance! I have always been ambivalent about Facebook. Now that I was locked out, I could get back to real life on a full-time basis. Or so I thought.
But Facebook had me where it wanted. I was travelling, and had made important appointments over Facebook. Without access to my account, I had no way of communicating with these people, of knowing where to meet them, or even letting them know that there was a problem. The irony was that I’d stayed away from Facebook for the longest time to avoid precisely such a scenario. But Facebook is clever. It doesn’t enforce its ‘real names’ policy when you first sign up — no identity proofs are required. It strikes only when you’ve been lured in and truly trapped. I had no choice but to obey Facebook if I wanted to retrieve data pertaining to my travel and work.
After locking me out, Facebook emailed me asking for my ‘authentic’ name. I sent it my authentic name — the byline you see with this article. Facebook emailed back to inform me that I must be mistaken — my authentic name could not be G. Sampath. I sent another email, pointing out that Facebook’s “simplistic system doesn’t recognise non-Western nomenclatures. Please check with a Tamil-speaking member of your team if my name is authentic or not.”
It made no difference. Facebook insisted that I email it a government-issued document that had my “authentic identity”, my photograph, and my date of birth on it.
After much anguish (all wasted), I sent Facebook a scanned copy of my driver’s licence. Facebook rejected it. I finally sent Facebook my PAN card — taking care to hide my PAN number. It somehow passed muster. Facebook wrote back to say that the door was open and I could crawl back in.
On the bright side, I had nothing much to lose — apart from my virtual dignity, which shall remain forever diminished by my humiliating surrender to Facebook’s ridiculous demands. The technical forfeiture of my already vandalised privacy doesn’t count. But the loss — in the case of a Syrian dissident forced into silence, or an LGBT person forced out of the closet, or a human rights activist picked up by the secret police — is incalculable.
Digital dystopia This state of affairs raises several uncomfortable questions, especially now that we are tripping over each other to usher in a so-called Digital India.
Entities such as Facebook and Google are not public institutions and, therefore, not subject to laws like the RTI. And yet, given that they offer the public what have become more or less life-critical services, — services patronised by a huge swathe of humanity — how do we make their functioning transparent, and accountable to both individual users and to society?
What if Google decides to suspend your email account tomorrow? What recourse do you have? Given that Facebook has become a vital political platform for dissemination of non-mainstream views and news, shouldn’t there be a democratic mechanism to hold it responsible for its actions in shutting down dissident pages?
After all, a Facebook or a Google can always turn around and say, “If you don’t like us, stay away!” That’s one of the advantages of a market society — rights wither away and dissolve into meaningless choices.
Facebook has so far defended its real names policy by claiming that it is necessary to make its space safe for everyone. But critics have countered this by pointing out that this objective is better achieved by tracking user behaviour and pulling up delinquent users than by trying to extract identity documents from thousands of well-behaved users, who pose no threat to anyone’s safety.
The letter from the human rights groups has given Facebook time till October 31, 2015 to respond. If Facebook takes the criticism on board and scraps this policy, it would earn a lot of goodwill and the respect of its users. But if it persists with the current system, it shall only end up advertising its arrogance — not to mention a market for an alternative social network that is less greedy about people’s data and more understanding of what identity means to non-bots.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
