The recent ISIS attack has led to widespread condemnation and action by social media companies to take down accounts that are suspected to be run by the terrorist group. Anonymous has been taking down Twitter accounts that belong to ISIS but for Facebook, it took a different turn where they ended up taking down an account with the word “Isis” in the name.
The user, Isis Anchalee is an Engineer according to a Twitter profile and she showed her discontent about the matter by querying the Facebook account on Twitter.
@facebook why would you disable my personal account? MY REAL NAME IS ISIS ANCHALEE /facepalm
— Isis Anchalee (@isisAnchalee) November 16, 2015
The next day, she tweeted of her attempts to prove her authenticity by apparently sending photos of her screenshot so that she could recover her account. Luckily, a Facebook engineer was able to reply to Anchalee’s request and was able to report the matter to the relevant people in the company. They say a third time’s a charm and just 7 minutes later, she tweeted a screenshot where Facebook informed her they were able to “verify her identity”
Third time sending in my information is the charm I guess. I'm back in 🙂 pic.twitter.com/m0demGZitw
— Isis Anchalee (@isisAnchalee) November 17, 2015
This incident demonstrated that it is not that easy for Facebook to change your name even if the reason was genuine. It is all thanks to the attention the situation got and the Facebook engineer who was able to be in contact with her that enabled her query to be solved quickly.
Facebook has a rather comprehensive policy where they sort of force users to use their real names. According to one of their support pages, your name should not be offensive, have symbols, containing characters from different languages and so on. This has resulted in some accounts being closed due to the fact that their real name seems “fake” or in other cases fake names are processed to be real.
