Facebook kicks out users with weird names
Nicholas Carlson · 09/25/08 02:00PMElmo Keep is a legal name, but the Australian woman who uses it got booted from Facebook because of it anyway. Facebook's customer sevice drones didn't let her back on the site — and in fact wouldn't tell her why she was banned. Until she mailed them copies of her passport and driver's license, always a risky proposition — Facebook once accidentally published a user's driver's license under similar circumstances. This happens to lots of people with weird names like Ms. Keep's, because part of Facebook's pitch to advertisers is that on the site, users are "authentically themselves" and if they're not, as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg puts it in this clip: "We kick you off." The irony, of course, is that people with unusual names often decide to sign up with more common fake names. The Sydney Morning Herald came up with a list of real names that got users banned from the site: