Salman Rusdie in a tug of nym war with facebook and the CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Salman Rusdie in a tug of nym war with facebook and the CEO Mark Zuckerberg

The writer Salman Rushdie hit Twitter on Monday morning with a litany of exasperated posts. Facebook, he wrote, had deactivated his account, demanded proof of identity and then turned him into Ahmed Rushdie, which is how he is identified on his passport.
He never used his first name, Ahmed, he pointed out; the world knows him as Salman.

Would Facebook have turned J. Edgar Hoover into John Hoover, he scoffed, or F. Scott Fitzgerald into Francis Fitzgerald?

Salma Rushdie had this to say on his twitter account “They have reactivated my FB page as ‘Ahmed Rushdie,’ in spite of the world knowing me as Salman. Morons,” the author wrote on his account. After trying to get some technical support, Rushdie said he hoped
“ridicule by the Twitterverse will achieve what I can’t.”

 "Where are you hiding, Mark?" he demanded of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive. "Come out here and give me back my name!"

Google also instituted a strict real-name policy on its social network, Google+, but has been relaxing that rule in the face of complaints from people who say they have legitimate reasons to use online pseudonyms.

 Celebrities often go by different or stylized versions of their names publicly, but domestic violence victims and political dissidents can also rely on pseudonyms for safety. The discussion over the use of these names online has been referred to as the
“nym wars.”

 Rushdie’s predicament points to one of the trickiest notions about life in the digital age: are you who you say you are online? Whose business is it – and what for?

The argument over pseudonyms – known online as the "nym wars" – goes to the heart of how the internet might be organised in the future. Major internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have a valuable stake in this debate – and, in some cases,
vastly different corporate philosophies on the issue that signal their own ambitions.

Rushdie, who once lived incognito because of death threats, has more recently been busy revealing himself on Twitter. He had to fight for his online name there as well. An imposter was using the Twitter handle @SalmanRushdie this year, and Rushdie had to
ask the company for help reclaiming it. Now his page bears Twitter’s blue "Verified Account" checkmark and quotes Popeye: "I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam."

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Posted by Hassan Ali on Nov 16 2011. Filed under Latest News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry