Facebook is under fire for closing down accounts from people with unusual names without notice. But the firm says such blunders are too rare to make it worth checking on the suspicious names before freezing the accounts.

The Associated Press reports on the case of Alicia Istanbul, a woman from Marietta, Georgia who has had an account in that name for two years. She’s a victim of Facebook’s attempts to guard an important principle of the site: that users sign up and run their accounts under their real name. As well as maintaining credibility, it’s also intended to give an air of maturity to distinguish the site from rivals such as MySpace which are filled with millions of fairysparkle944lyfes and the like.

Istanbul told the agency that losing access to the account was a major blow: “I was on it all day. I had built my entire social network around it.” That may seem a little extreme to some, but as she points out “That’s what Facebook wants you to do.” Facebook eventually restored Istanbul’s account, though only after three weeks, countless e-mails and a dozen written letters.

The incident follows a previous controversy when a Native American user with the legal name Robin Kills The Enemy had her account closed with a notice that using a fake name was a violation of the site’s terms of use.

Facebook maintains a database of suspicious names which can’t be used without prior verification. This changes with current events: since the leap to fame of British singer Susan Boyle, Facebook has kept a close eye on people attempting to sign up under that name for fear of people impersonating her.

The system clearly lets some slip through the net however. In what must be a first in Associated Press history, reporter Barbara Ortutay searched the site for the name “Seymour Butts”. There were 13, though it’s uncertain how many have the birth certificate to prove it.

Under the current system, anyone whose account is disabled for a suspicious name must contact the site and verify their name, in some cases with official identification. It would seem simple enough to change this process so that suspicious accounts are asked to verify their name within a time limit (say 28 days) and only if this limit expires will the account be closed. But Facebook says giving advance notification of potential closures is “not something we are doing right now.”

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Entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 4:23 pm under Amusing, Social Media, Web2.0.

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