Facebook Cleanup Efforts

Jeffrey Lehman was not the only profile affected by Facebook’s recent cleanup efforts. A quick search yielded other similar stories.

On May 8, a contributor wrote to Columbia’s Bwog:

The Harvard-spawned fascists who control facebook.com apparently have begun purging the site of one of its best features: funny profiles.

It seems they decided that Aaron Burr didn’t do his job properly the first time (did you expect any better from a Princeton alum?) and deleted Alexander Hamilton’s profile. Over 1200 Columbians and 1000 other students nationwide lost a dear friend. I attempted to log in today and received this gloating error message: “Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact info@facebook.com for more information.”

The MIT student Anders Kaseorg emailed Facebook on March 28:

It’s not a fake name at all. I already have an account–I’m Anders Kaseorg. I just also have an account for my cow, who really is called the “Cow with No Name” (long story). This account represents my cow: it uses a (working) email address specific to my cow, has profile details about my cow, and friends people who are acquainted with my cow.

If you’re actually shutting down accounts like this, why are you picking on my poor cow instead of the 49 members of the self-proclaimed “Fake-ass People” group? Accounts such as “Charles Vest” really *could* be mistaken for the real former MIT president. But my cow never hurt anyone.

Anders

The response he received:

Hey,

Facebook is intended to facilitate communication between real people, and your cow is not a real person. We are working on taking down all of these other fake accounts as well, but as I’m sure you can imagine, this takes awhile. Thanks again for your understanding and cooperation in this.

–
Simon
Customer Service Representative
Facebook

The entire conversation is available on his personal blog.

It’s a cruel world. There must be many more stories like these two.