Why Facebook can go like itself in the arse: 2016 v1.0

Dear Facebook peeps,

Firstly, love you guys – only true saints would take out the time to indulge a crazy person like me and for that I thank you. You know, for following me and all that.
I’ve had some recent issues with Facebook and remain cautiously optimistic but I don’t see Facebook coming around and growing a bit of good, common sense somewhere on the inside, or even on the outside if I’m honest. So there’s a good chance that despite my needing Facebook to promote my writing and draw readers and engage with amazing folks like you all, I might not be here much longer.

Secondly, quick recap of the cause for this note and the current “State of the Akshay-Union” here on Facebook:

I have an account here that has a nickname on it, one my friends laugh about and I’m fond of – but Sauron, I mean Facebook!, being the benevolent overseer that it is, decided that it wanted me (and only me, not you) needs to provide them with a government issued ID to prove who I am and use my “legal name as per said document” on my profile.

Apart from the obvious first mental-warning that even photo-shopped I have no desire to share scans of my official IDs with an overlord like Zuckerbook there was also the fact that it was a gross invasion of my right to privacy and to use my nickname on my personal profile that I share only with my actual, IN REAL NON-ONLINE LIFE friends,

Well that all aside, I just thought it was obnoxious and shady of them.
Okay, fine.
But then it turns out when I looked up this “new policy” online and it turns out they tried to do this once before in the second half of 2015.
And like all their “new rollouts” they tried to do it as a “soft release” (that’s what she said, to facebook and yes I know that was a terrible joke – but you’re following this page so get over it!) whereby they tried to shove it down the throats of a few people online at first before they went ahead and shoved it down EVERYONES throats, whether they had gotten good feedback or terrible.
They also already got into fights about this issue and were protested against by people who had accounts under pseudonyms for their own personal safety/well-being/etc and nicknames that all their friends knew them by – but of course none of those names are going to be, obviously, on official documents.
So Facebook backed off. Temporarily of course because once they have an idea, it’s like a weed that you can’t kill or more accurately: fungus among us that just won’t die.

Now by refusing to give them official documents and regardless of my emailing a grievance officer, trying to leave comments on help threads and various means of communicating – all I got was automated responses (at least they read like they were) basically quoting the ID policy that was on their site back again. Which made me want to punch someone in the face but I like me computer so my screen survived.

In any case, the bottom line is that they lovingly blocked me from facebook. My account still exists but I can’t log into it without uploading a JPG of my official ID, which I’m not going to do.

SO, expecting this impasse to happen, I have given admin rights for my official Facebook page – which is still up – to a friend, aka, an Agent of D.H.A.R if you will, and he has kindly agreed to keep an eye on it for the moment, share things like this there with you good people and delete the page if it comes to that.

Other Agents of D.H.A.R are kindly overseeing the Meta Desi Comics and Jataka Manga pages on my behalf.

I hope this gets resolved amicably, but just wanted to share this freely with you before that happens and if it does, getting off Facebook is NOT the end of the world and I’ll be around the internet elsewhere – be it Twitter, my Blog, the Meta Desi website or even if you’re that rare wonder that is on Google+, like me!

Regardless, I’ll see you all around the interwebs!

Cheers,

Akshay Dhar, Scribbler

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