Have a beef with Facebook? Take to Twitter.
At least that’s what Salman Rushdie did when he discovered Facebook had deactivated his account because they wanted further proof of his identity.
When the esteemed writer found out, he began tweeting up a storm, asking Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “@MarkZuckerbergF? Are you listening?”
“Maybe @MarkZuckerbergF is a phony. Is the real #Zuckerbergon Twitter? Where are you hiding, Mark? Come out here and give me back my name!”
Facebook had reactivated Rushdie's account under the name “Ahmed Rushdie” because “Salman” is his middle name on his passport, but Rushdie decided to appeal to his 116,000-plus followers in protest.
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He began listing famous people who went by their middle name – Brad Pitt, Paul McCartney, Evelyn Waugh – and tweeted “Dear #Facebook, forcing me to change my FB name from Salman to Ahmed Rushdie is like forcing J. Edgar to become John Hoover.”
“Or, if F. Scott Fitzgerald was on #Facebook, would they force him to be Francis Fitzgerald? What about F. Murray Abraham?”
Eventually, whether through his Twitter protest, his calls to customer service or another means, Facebook restored his page under the name Salman.
As a story in the New York Times points out, this story merits examination of a larger issue – identification in the digital age.
Some object to the lax privacy settings of Facebook, and the desire of such services to obtain as much personal information about their clientele as possible.
While the use of a pseudonym online would seem innocuous, many businesses demand it in the interest of their own advertising and profits, and for the alleged safety of its users.
Rushdie is a man who once had to hide his true identity for his own safety. Well, he is now very much out in the open.