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Facebook flags aboriginal names as not 'authentic'

By John Bowman, CBC News Posted: Feb 25, 2015 11:15 AM ET

 

Facebook requires its users to use a profile name that’s the same as the name they use in real life, but some indigenous people say the social network is rejecting their real names because they don’t conform to its standards.

Earlier this month, Dana Lone Hill, a member of the Lakota people living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, tried to log in to her Facebook account. She was met with an error message asking her to change her name.

The message read: “It looks like the name on your Facebook account may not be your authentic name.”

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And so did Kimberly TallBear, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate.

“I just tried to log in one day and they said you can’t log in and your account has been suspended,” she said. “It just kind of came out of the blue. I’d been on Facebook since 2009.”

When TallBear emailed Facebook, they asked her to send in I.D. to confirm her name and the spelling, but they weren’t satisfied with that, either.

“They didn’t like the unusual capitalization,” said TallBear, whose name appears as one word with a capital B on government issued identification.

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