Salman Rushdie's Facebook Name Changed To Ahmed Rushdie
Booker Prize-winning writer Salman Rushdie has taken to Twitter lambasting Facebook for changing the name on his personal profile.
Rushdie, known the world over for authoring Midnight's Children and the Satanic Verses among other celebrated works, goes by his middle name, Salman, although he was born Ahmed Rushdie.
According to a post on his verified Twitter account (@SalmanRushdie), Facebook suspended his profile because of the name discrepancy.
Rushdie tweeted that he "had to send a photo of my passport page" to verify his identity, but he wrote that Facebook insisted that he use his first name as his Facebook name.
Rushdie fired off a series of tweets slamming Facebook on Monday. He demanded that Facebook change his profile to the name that he has chosen to use.
Despite Facebook's policy that a user's profile name reflect his "real name," Facebook gave in and changed Rushdie's profile within an hour of his outraged tweets.
Take a look at the screenshot (below) from Rushdie's Facebok profile, as of 12:30 p.m. Monday.
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By 1 p.m., Facebook had relented and restored his profile to its original name.
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This hiccup highlights a gray area in Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities policy, which states that users must user their real names and doesn't take into account users who go by middle names or who are known by their pseudonyms.
Google's social network, Google+, has also come under fire from users for a similar "real name" policy.
Writes The Huffington Post's Craig Kanalley:
If you're not using your real name, first and last, you can't use Google+. This one has really hurt Google, and there's been plenty of attention to the issue thanks to influencers like Andy Carvin and HuffPost blogger Jillian York. Anonymity is sometimes a necessity for safety sake. And yet there are exceptions like rapper "Pitbull." This has made the G+ community furious and troubled on-lookers, and it could have been prevented.
However, this policy may change soon for Google users. In October, Google's social chief Vic Gundotra promised that the search giant's social network would soon allow users to open accounts using pseudonyms.
Check out Rushdie's tweets (below), which helped him restore his Facebook profile.
(Hat tip to the Atlantic for pointing out Rushdie's predicament.)
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Rushdie had won the Pulitzer Prize. We regret the confusion.
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The Huffington Post Catharine Smith First Posted: 11/14/11 01:48 PM ET Updated: 11/14/11 05:37 PM ET