This post originally appeared on Jillian C. York's blog.
Over the course of the past week, I've gotten reports from a number of people whose personal Facebook pages have been removed or deleted from the Facebook platform. At first, it was a male friend in Morocco. Then a female, Moroccan friend in Boston. Then an Indian woman in the UK. And then even more.
Once I investigated a bit further and spoke to each of them, I discovered what each of them have in common: All of them are critical of Islam (some are atheists, others ex-Muslims, still others reformers) and post frequently articles and status updates about the religion.
And then someone told me that a group was created on Facebook (in Arabic) for the sole purpose of reporting, and thus having removed, Facebook profiles of atheist Arabs. The group, which appears to have also been removed, was entitled “Facebook pesticide” and its sole purpose was to “identity Atheists / Agnostic / anti-religion in the Arab world and specifically in Tunisia …” Once identified, the group members would then attempt to report such users.
Of course it's problematic that there's a group of people seeking to destroy the online identities of users of a certain group, but that's not the issue I'm going to address in this blog post. Instead, I will address why Facebook's strategy toward dealing with situations like this is so problematic:
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 5:23 PM, The Facebook Team <appeals+0pmdmcp@support.facebook.com> wrote:
Hi,At this time, we cannot verify the ownership of the account under this address. Please reply to this email with a scanned image of a government-issued photo ID (e.g., driver's license) in order to confirm your ownership of the account. Please black out any personal information that is not needed to verify your identity (e.g., social security number). Rest assured that we will permanently delete your ID from our servers once we have used it to verify the authenticity of your account.
Please keep in mind that fake accounts are a violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited.
In addition to your photo ID, please include all of our previous correspondence in your response so that we can refer to your original email. Once we have received this information, we will reevaluate the status of the account. Please note that we will not be able to process your request unless you send in proper identification. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thanks,
Dominique
User Operations
So basically, we're supposed to trust Facebook to handle our identities with care? Facebook, of the notoriously sketchy Privacy Policy? No thanks!
The rest of this I've written about here. Effectively, the problem is this: For activists, Facebook's terms of service are simply not clear enough, and its methods for profile removal and reinstatement not transparent.
My recommendations to Facebook?
Any other recommendations you'd make to Facebook?