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Why I’m no Longer on facebook and Refuse to Go Back
Saturday, December 20th, 2014 03:58 pmI want all those who were my friends on facebook to know that I haven’t blocked any of you. Some time on the night of Monday December 15 or early morning of December 16, 2014, after almost five years’ loyal use of facebook as my primary social networking platform, the powers that be at facebook decided to close my account on the grounds of their new-but-just-as-discriminatory “authentic” names policy — the very one that was supposed to replace their older “real” names policy.
Since Vlad Drăculea is indeed my authentic name — not only is this the name I had in a well known past incarnation, but nearly everyone I know knows me by this name, including my family (who also know me by my given name) — I would very much like to demonstrate this to facebook, but I can’t because for the past several years I have been hunted by a tenacious stalker with a very long memory.
So far, I’ve been lucky: my stalker hasn’t figured out to try looking me up under this name. From the little he ever knew about me and about my personal beliefs, I think he would find my use of this name to be quite a non sequitur. And I want to keep it that way. Hence I won’t try to prove my identity to facebook, given that none of the methods of identification facebook will accept from me would be safe for me to use, since they either involve changing my name legally to this name (thus leaving a neat paper trail for my stalker to follow), or connecting my name with my street-address (since I can’t afford a P.O. box and couldn’t get to the post office often enough to check on it due to chronic illness), and I don’t want to endanger a friend by using their address.
As a result, I’m now asking those of you that are able to leave facebook to join me on Diaspora and/or Ello from now on. Facebook’s ridiculous and often discriminatory policies make it unsafe for stalking victims, and were there no other social networks, would utterly isolate us from the online activity of family and friends. So please join me on one or more of these platforms:
Diaspora: https://seattlediaspora.org/u/vladdraculea (or vladdraculea@seattlediaspora.org, but that's not an e-mail address, it's a pod location);
Ello: https://ello.co/vladdraculea;
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VladDr%C4%83culeavod%C4%83 (or https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VladDrăculeavodă);
YouTube, (though I haven't made more than one ancient video on it because no spoons for transcription and video descriptions): https://www.youtube.com/user/VladIIIDraculea;
There's this blog, of course: http://vladdraculea.dreamwidth.org;
Tumblr: http://vladdraculea.tumblr.com;
And my very much-neglected Twitter: https://twitter.com/VladIIIDraculea.
Since Vlad Drăculea is indeed my authentic name — not only is this the name I had in a well known past incarnation, but nearly everyone I know knows me by this name, including my family (who also know me by my given name) — I would very much like to demonstrate this to facebook, but I can’t because for the past several years I have been hunted by a tenacious stalker with a very long memory.
So far, I’ve been lucky: my stalker hasn’t figured out to try looking me up under this name. From the little he ever knew about me and about my personal beliefs, I think he would find my use of this name to be quite a non sequitur. And I want to keep it that way. Hence I won’t try to prove my identity to facebook, given that none of the methods of identification facebook will accept from me would be safe for me to use, since they either involve changing my name legally to this name (thus leaving a neat paper trail for my stalker to follow), or connecting my name with my street-address (since I can’t afford a P.O. box and couldn’t get to the post office often enough to check on it due to chronic illness), and I don’t want to endanger a friend by using their address.
As a result, I’m now asking those of you that are able to leave facebook to join me on Diaspora and/or Ello from now on. Facebook’s ridiculous and often discriminatory policies make it unsafe for stalking victims, and were there no other social networks, would utterly isolate us from the online activity of family and friends. So please join me on one or more of these platforms:
Diaspora: https://seattlediaspora.org/u/vladdraculea (or vladdraculea@seattlediaspora.org, but that's not an e-mail address, it's a pod location);
Ello: https://ello.co/vladdraculea;
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VladDr%C4%83culeavod%C4%83 (or https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VladDrăculeavodă);
YouTube, (though I haven't made more than one ancient video on it because no spoons for transcription and video descriptions): https://www.youtube.com/user/VladIIIDraculea;
There's this blog, of course: http://vladdraculea.dreamwidth.org;
Tumblr: http://vladdraculea.tumblr.com;
And my very much-neglected Twitter: https://twitter.com/VladIIIDraculea.
I suggest both Diaspora and Ello as good replacements for facebook. While Google+ might be a better platform at this time, I suspect it'll be overtaken by either or both of the first mentioned sites eventually, so I'm not bothering much with it these days.
