Is Facebook Deleting Second Life Users? Not Many

Last week, some Second Life users of Facebook were worried when there were whispers going around about accounts of Second Life users being deleted. While there seems to be some truth to this, the number seems relatively small. Of the fans of the Second Life Newser page, the number of "Likes" went down by about ten, or about 2 percent of the total.

The issue came up before two years ago when more residents expressed alarm over what to some seemed like a purge of Facebook users using their Second Life names. The issues are much the same now as then: Second Life users either insisting on Internet anonymity or posting under their SL names because that's what they were known as online vs Facebook being *the* social site on the Internet and having an inconsistently enforced policy that people use their "real names," even if everything the user posts about was done under a virtual identity.

Much of the responses are the same now as then, from "just change the name," to accusations of bait and switch. Hamlet Au of New World Notes recommended instead of using account names as Facebook names, create a page for the Second Life account name. He also suggested since Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka has become one of Facebook's top engineers and "brought over about had a oxen other Linden engineers to the Facebook team, … any … attention Second Life gets from Facebook's higher ups is more likely to be positive than negative." Facebook itself insists they do not go looking for people to delete, but that most accounts that are taken offline are from complaints by other users.

For yours truly, most of what I post is about Second Life, very little about real life activities, and so my name on the billion member social site remains what it is. It's simpler that way. Also, the number of fans on the Newser page has been growing again. So it appears the deletions are over, for now.



On another note, Facebook recently made International News. A Khalil Shreateh tried to alert them about a weak spot in their security. But he was ignored. His response, using the exploit to post on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's page about the weakness. Naturally, the response came within minutes.

Although there is a million US dollar reward for pointing out vulnerabilities, Facebook refuses to pay Shreateh. The official reason is that he violated the TOS. But as Shreateh is a Palestinian, perhaps Zuckerberg didn't want to appear to be sending money to the antagonists of Israel, America's best friend in the Middle East. Since then however, Shreateh has reportedly gotten a number of IT job offers, plus a sum of money raised by supporters in an effort organized by cybersecurity company BeyondTrust.



Sources: New World Notes, Venturebeat

Bixyl Shuftan