Facebook needs to be refined

A recent Facebook hiccup caused the accounts of some Native Americans to be banned when names such as “Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes” and “Parmelee Kills the Enemy” were deemed fictitious.

This has caused activists to take legal action against the Facebook corporation. According to The Guardian, Dana Lone Hill found her account deactivated after she changed her name on the account from her mother’s name, Lone Hill, to reflect her father’s name, Lone Elk. “I want to bring this lawsuit for Native America because these are our real names, these are the names we were given, these were the names we were born with,” Lone Hill said.

As a result of Facebook neglecting to verify their names, Native American users, including Lone Hill, had to show proof of verification to the social media company in order to reinstate their accounts — with varying degrees of success.

The incident showed that even for billion-dollar companies like Facebook, it can be challenging to cater to the specific needs and characteristics of their users, even with all of the resources they have at their disposal. While the Internet and other technological advancements have made it possible to connect millions of people from around the world, the immense number of people is exactly what makes it so hard to create a personalized experience for every user, or in this case, some Native Americans. This is important given that social media interaction has grown tremendously over the past couple of years.

For Native Americans, or any person, really, a name is an important part of identity. When companies like Facebook reject certain names as false or even change them to more Anglicized versions, as reported by some users in the incident, they are framing the way those users are able to present themselves online. Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes, for example, had his name changed to “Lance Brown.” As a result, his identity, Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes had his name changed to “Lance Brown,” effectively losing some of his Native American identity in the reduction of his name. This transgression affects his interaction with friends or other users, who, after chatting with “Lance Brown” on Facebook, may also begin to see Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes as someone without a Native American identity.

Facebook presents many features, such as staying in contact with friends who do not live within close proximity. Facebook allows people to engage with friends who do not live within close proximity, the rest of community and even the world. Though connections can now easily be maintained between people who have access to computers, there needs to be a counteraction to create a more individualized experience.

From a technological viewpoint, it is incredibly difficult to create a system that accounts for every single trait, characteristic and idiosyncrasy of the more than seven billion people on our planet. Facebook’s policy on gender identity from 2014 provides a glimpse into this. When signing up for the first time, users were given 50 different options to put as their gender, from the traditional “male” and “female” to other options such as “transgender,” “cisgender” and “intersex.” The fact that there are so many options for just one aspect of a person’s identity shows how complex people really are. Because of this variation in individual personality and traits, one simply cannot expect social media companies to cater to all of our specific identities.

Ultimately, incidents like these are a reminder that social media companies cannot cater to all of their users’ needs, and that one should exercise some caution when relying on social media to interact with other people. Imperfect representations of users, while seemingly harmless at first, can change the way people see each other and themselves.