Isis Anchalee, a 22-year-old, from San Francisco, US, is not a terrorist but a female software engineer, whose Facebook account was recently deactivated a by the Facebook authorities after recent terror attacks in Paris where the ISIS claimed the responsibilities for the carnage of innocent lives.
Isis Anchalee complained on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon that her Facebook account had been disabled, and suggested it was because of her name ISIS. “Why would you disable my personal account? MY REAL NAME IS ISIS ANCHALEE,” she tweeted.
“Facebook thinks I’m a terrorist and froze my account and wouldn’t accept that I was a person, not a global terrorist organization, even when I sent the scan of my passport.
Isis had to ‘verify’ her identity three times, including sending the scan copy of her passport before Facebook would accept that she was a human being, rather than a sinister Syrian death cult.
A Facebook researcher, Omid Farivar, tweeted at Anchalee publicly to apologize eight hours after her initial complaint on Tuesday. “Isis sorry about this. I don’t know what happened. I’ve reported it to the right people and we’re working on fixing it.”
Earlier this year Facebook cemented a policy requiring people to use their real names. Users are asked to refrain from adding symbols, punctuation, unusual characters, professional or religious titles, or “offensive or suggestive words of any kind” to their names to “keep our community safe”.
An online petition calling for media to “stop calling terrorists [Islamic State] by our name” closed on 24 August with more than 56,800 signatures.
Its founder, Isis Martinez of Miami, Florida, said women named Isis were “facing the unnecessary backlash of this irresponsible choice by the media”.