Facebook bans those with funny names

AFTER A childhood of being beaten up in the playground, people with daft names are now having their Facebook book accounts suspended.

The anti-social notworking site is suspending the owners of strange names without warning and holding personal information to ransom until you show them a government-issued ID.

Sydney's Elmo Keep tried to login to her account and was told she was banned for life for violating the site's terms of use. Facebook believed she was not using her real names.

According to AP other names who have been banned include US political blogger Jon Swift, Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, British MP Steve Webb, Australian graphic designer Beta Yee, and New Zealander Rowena Gay. If you have a surname that includes " podcast", "beaver", "jelly", "beer" and "duck" you could also be banned.

Unfortunately for Facebook, Ms Keep is a hack who slags off popular beat combos for a living and is not likely to stay quiet. Apparently she relies on the site as her primary way of keeping in touch with friends and as a way of soliciting freelance writing work.

She is also an online journalism lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, and consulting for businesses on how they can incorporate social networking into their business strategy so she knows a bit about the Interweb.

She felt like her world had been ripped from under her, she claimed. People had noticed she had gone from Facebook and thought she had died.

After finding out the Facebook email address, which was so difficult required black magic and talking to the dead, Keep was told she had been banned for 'security reasons'.

In other words, the site feared she might poke someone too hard and there would be a fatality. Terrorist poking is Al Qaeda's latest evil trick. They asked her to prove her identity with a government approved ID which would prove that she is not a member of a terror poking cell.

Keep had her account reinstated after she sent the site copies of her passport and driver's license.

Ironically Facebook's rules mean that people with unusual names are forced to sign up with fake names to avoid being banned.

This happens in real life. A bloke in my school changed his name from Badcock to Badco, ironically after he left the school where he was ribbed over the moniker. Makes us wonder whether that nice US press officer Wendy Wank changed her name after her experiences with the newsroom of Network News a while back. She has not come sniffing about the offices of the INQ. Probably has more sense. µ

L'INQ
AP