Post a Comment On: ehewlett

I've now received a couple of responses from Facebook (one direct, one indirect), done a little more research of my own, and done a lot more (way too much) thinking about the identity issue - and reached a decision.

First, the direct response from Facebook, which seems to be yet another form letter, this time from a (possibly real?) person named Jenkins, again of Facebook Community Operations:

Hi,

Thanks for your response. On Facebook, you can list another name (ex: nickname, professional title, maiden name) on your Timeline along with your authentic name. When you add another name to your account, people can search for you by both your authentic name and your other name. You also have the option to list this name next to your authentic name on your Timeline.

Keep in mind that using your other name to pretend to be anything or anyone doesn't follow our Community Standards.

Learn how to add, edit or remove another name in the Help Center:

https://www.facebook.com/help/131728300237162?ref=cr

If you have any other questions about our name policies, please visit:

https://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078?ref=cr

View updates from your support dashboard: [link redacted]

Thanks,

Jenkins
Community Operations
Facebook

So, clearly Facebook doesn't get it. The whole point that I am trying to get across is that "Fr. Justin" is my authentic identity, the name by which I am known in real life - something more than just a "professional title", and definitely not just a "nickname". I am fully aware that I could add "Fr. Justin" in the "Other Names" field of my profile and have it show up at the top of the profile in parentheses after my "real name". The point I am trying to make is that, for most of those who know me on Facebook, "Fr. Justin" is my real name and "Edward" is my other name. Yes, adding "Fr. Justin" as an "other name" would allow people to find me in searches - but it wouldn't allow them to refer to me (via tagging, links, etc.) as anything other than Edward. Which means that Facebook is forcing my parishioners to refer to me primarily using a name they are unfamiliar with and using a level of informality that is out of sync with our Orthodox Christian culture. In other words, Facebook is imposing its college-campus-culture informality on everybody. They don't get it.

The indirect response I received from Facebook came from an e-mail forwarded to me from Mr. Theo Nicolakis, Chief Information Officer of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which seems to have been sent out to all of their clergy. It's lengthy and basically reiterates Facebook's policy of "no titles on personal accounts" without making a distinction between clerical titles and business, academic, or any other kinds of titles (I would suggest there is an important distinction to be made between the respectful, relational role of "Father" which extends into all aspects of life and the business/academic honorifics that are often left behind at the office), so I won't quote it in full here. The more interesting part of the e-mail is Facebook's proposed solution to the problem that Mr. Nicolakis' e-mail conveys "in an attempt to alleviate confusion on this matter and provide you with some guidance." (I would suggest that it is Facebook's doublespeak on this issue that has created the confusion, but that's another matter I will take up a bit later.)

The solution that Mr. Nicolakis proposes, which seems to be being conveyed directly from Facebook, is for clergy to ensure that their accounts are set up with their legal names, then create a Facebook page for their clerical identity, as they would for their parish.

At first glance, this seemed to be a potential solution - one unavailable to me when I created my Facebook account eight years ago - which could actually side-step one of the biggest problems with my own solution, since it seems like it should allow me to post directly from my profile as "Edward" or from my Facebook page as "Fr. Justin". Not only that, but, contrary to my initial thought that this solution would still force people to refer to me in tags only as "Edward", page names can also be used as tags in photos and posts. In short, this solution seemed like it might provide me with the flexible self-representation I have been looking for, while allowing my Facebook friends with the choice on how they refer to me that I am wanting Facebook to provide.

So, I tried it. I took another picture of my legal ID and submitted it along with an obedient request that Facebook change my name to Edward Hewlett. (I actually tried this a couple of times, resubmitting the same legal ID photo to Facebook that I'd submitted before, and got no response from Facebook. I suspect their algorithm ignored those previous requests because it recognized that I'd resubmitted the same photo.) It worked. I got back into my account as "Edward Hewlett" and got busy setting up my "Fr. Justin" Facebook page, as suggested.

[Image]The first inkling I had that Facebook still didn't get it was when I chose to set up my page as an "Artist, Band or Public Figure". Scanning the list of categories, I saw Artist, Blogger, Business Person... even Fictional Character and Chef, but no category for Priest or Pastor - or even something generic like Religious Representative. As is so common in our enlightened electronic era, religion doesn't exist. Even Fictional Characters and Pets are more important than Priests.

Still, I wanted this solution to work, so I chose the ultra-generic category "Public Figure" and, just before clicking on the Get Started button, checked out the "Facebook Page Terms" I was agreeing to. Hmm... Term I.C. (interesting number, eh?) stood out: "Content posted to a Page is public and viewable by everyone who can see the Page." So, no privacy. I suppose that, on some level, that makes sense, given that I am setting up a page for me to use as a public figure, but... Well, OK, I guess. I really want this to work. I clicked through, finished setting up my page, then switched to viewing Facebook as my new Page, "Fr. Justin".

No news feed. Pages don't get news feeds - only people do.

So, hang on a second, Facebook. Your ultimate solution to the complex identity challenge I face as Father Justin is to force me to use Facebook as a Page, not a person, to post on Facebook without any privacy restrictions, and to use Facebook without a news feed (unless I revert to my legal identity and view/post as "Edward")? Who uses Facebook without a news feed? I'm sorry, Facebook. You just don't get it.

Chris Cox's statement of the spirit of Facebook's "real name" policy is, quite simply, doublespeak. He states, in his apology to the drag queens (made under threat of their withdrawal from Facebook and the public outcry that was engendering) that "Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life." Yet Facebook still requires me to use my legal name in my profile and refuses to recognize "Father Justin" as the authentic name I use in real life, despite the evidence I have submitted.

In fact, Facebook's apology and policy adjustment appears to be doublespeak even for the drag queens. Seventeen days after the apology, the Guardian newspaper reported on its website that "Weeks after Facebook apologised for the way its “real-name” policy had led to the suspension of numerous drag queens’ accounts, user accounts are still being suspended or deactivated for not using people’s legal names." And Sister Roma himself, whose name Chris Cox singled out in his apology as an example of an "authentic name" ("For Sister Roma, that's Sister Roma.") is currently listed on Facebook as "Roma Roma (Sister Roma)". My guess is that the dropped (well, reduced to an "other name") "Sister" may well have been getting repeatedly flagged by Facebook's algorithms in the same way that my "Fr." title seems to have.

This is all somewhat worrying, as I suspect we are getting a glimpse of what life under our new robotic overlords may be like. I appreciate the difficulty that Facebook faces in enforcing its real-name policy: How does a relatively small company like Facebook effectively police an active user-base of more than one billion? In a scenario like this, rigid policies and robocops are perhaps inevitable. If Facebook allows the unsupervised use of titles, they will inevitably be held to account for some quack or con who misuses their platform to defraud others. But how do they supervise effectively on that scale?

Effectively, what Facebook has done in allowing only the use of legal IDs, is shift most of the workload onto a group of very experienced organizations that verify citizen's identities for a living (well, to protect their own existence, at any rate): the nation-states. This enables them to offload most of the work onto algorithms that can pre-scan and identify legal IDs, which can then be processed en masse by a minimal push-button human workforce: Greer and Jenkins, et. al. But this severely limits the identities they can allow.

It seems to me that what we have here is a situation similar to that portrayed in the ED-209 malfunction in the movie Robocop [warning: link NSFW or kids, at least not if your workplace or family culture is averse to over-the-top satirical violence], except in this case the victim of Facebook's robocop malfunction is an entire ancient sub-culture of honour and respect. In the end, Facebook is forcing Orthodox Christians to be assimilated into a narrow North American college-campus culture of informality, or they are forcing Orthodox clergy such as myself to use a form of Facebook with severely limited functionality: one in which we must maintain a rigid, artificial distinction between private and public life where one's public identity enjoys none of Facebook's privacy controls and where interacting with ones friends and acquaintances can only be done with one's legal identity.

I choose neither. I'm out. I've already packed my bags (by downloading my eight years' worth of Facebook content, which was surprisingly easy and light-weight - thank you, Facebook!), and, over the next few days, I'll be either deleting or delegating the few Facebook groups I've created. Then my intent is to delete my account.

I'm not opposed to Facebook. I've had issues with their obviously profit-motivated user-hostile privacy changes over the years, and I have issues with the culture of "look how successful and happy I am" that it encourages and with my own tendency to spend too much time getting distracted by it. My own response to being cut off from Facebook was revealing to me in that, despite receiving all sorts of e-mails of encouragement, I felt isolated and ignored - until I realized that I had been conditioned by eight years' worth of instant Facebook likes to expect an almost-instant flood of positive feedback. But Facebook is not intrinsically evil; it is tool for social interaction and, as such, it is what we make it.

I don't want to leave. Facebook is an important medium for online interaction - one of the agora of our day. But I don't feel I can, in good conscience, stay on the terms that Facebook is forcing me (and, by extension, those who know me as "Father Justin") to agree to. I hope Facebook will change in a way that will properly accommodate our Orthodox Christian sub-culture, and, if it does, I'm open to coming back. But, for now it's...

Goodbye Facebook. You just don't get it.