Thursday News: Facebook apologizes for “fake name” snafu, E-books and research libraries, global gender bias in film, and the DA ad book is open

JanetPublishing Newsdiscrimination / Ebooks / Facebook / Film / gender / LGBTQ / Libraries / privacy / research / sexual identity / sexual orientation4 Comments

Facebook’s chief product officer apologizes to the LGBTQ community – Facebook CPO Chris Cox penned what appears to be a pretty earnest and humble apology for discriminating against LGBTQ users by flagging their user names as fake. Although Facebook does not require birth names for its users, it does apparently match up a user’s name with their “real life” name, aka the name they’re known by on a day to day basis. Another example of how new policies often create negative, unintended consequences.

Below is part of Cox’s apology letter, and you can read it in its entirety by clicking on the story link.

In the two weeks since the real-name policy issues surfaced, we’ve had the chance to hear from many of you in these communities and understand the policy more clearly as you experience it. We’ve also come to understand how painful this has been. We owe you a better service and a better experience using Facebook, and we’re going to fix the way this policy gets handled so everyone affected here can go back to using Facebook as you were.

The way this happened took us off guard. An individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake. These reports were among the several hundred thousand fake name reports we process every single week, 99 percent of which are bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech, and more — so we didn’t notice the pattern. The process we follow has been to ask the flagged accounts to verify they are using real names by submitting some form of ID — gym membership, library card, or piece of mail. We’ve had this policy for over 10 years, and until recently it’s done a good job of creating a safe community without inadvertently harming groups like what happened here. –Gigaom

The Hidden Costs of E-books at University Libraries – Written by an English professor at San Diego State University who has apparently never heard of HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), this piece starts out with a relatively interesting thesis — what’s the impact of increasing digital collections at university libraries, especially major research libraries — and quickly devolves into a scare piece about how digital books in university libraries signals the end of civilization as we know it. Or something.

The article does make some good points — about, for example, how digital books are currently not available through interlibrary loan and also subject to page download quotas — but comparing digital research books to payday loans and insisting that they are making people dumb threatens to eclipse some of the more legitimate issues.

E-books prevent deep reading, their use is highly restricted, and they can vanish without notice, so why are the CSU and the UC libraries experimenting with replacing paper with computer files? Is the e-book phenomenon yet another example of university administrators chasing after the latest e-fad? Like MOOCs (which even Sebastian Thrun of Udacity called “a lousy product”), e-books trade something that works for something that doesn’t, and even worse, threaten to destroy the very notion of a library. What’s the attraction? The answer is that e-books seem like a cheap way to access hundreds, if not thousands, of expensive books essential for research and teaching. Right now, the subscription packages Proquest and Ebsco offer may sound like they cost a lot (between $500-$800,000 a year), but the price is “extremely low relative to the number of books acquired,” to quote the CSU report on the e-book pilot project. The average cost per book for Ebrary’s package is between $5 and $9, a spectacular savings given that the average price for a hardcover scholarly book in the humanities is around $100, and many are much more expensive. –Times of San Diego

What Country’s Film Industry Has the Best Gender Equity? – So, did you all know that Geena Davis has a research institute?? I didn’t. But the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, via Stacy Smith and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, conducted an interesting study about the global representation of women in film, as well as the proportion of women making films. Some results regarding that second measure are chronicled below, but in terms of women in film, the results are pretty interesting. Australia, China, Japan, and Korea have the most female film leads, with France, Russia, India, Germany, and Brazil at the bottom. Check out the article for more info, and the study page on the Institute’s website, where you can also download the full report. 

When thinking about gender representation in media, it’s essential to look at who is making our media. Female directors are more likely to work on projects with more women on screen. There’s no country that has gender balance behind the scenes in the film industry, but some do better than others. At the bottom of the pile is France, where male directors, writers, and producers outnumber women nine to one. Brazil is the most equitable overall, but the UK gets the special distinction of being the only film market where women make up a majority of film writers. –Bitch Magazine

The 2015 Dear Author ad book is open! – If you are interested in placing an ad at Dear Author, please contact ads@dearauthor.com for more information. We have ad space in Zone 4 for Oct and Dec 2014, and the Leaderboard in Nov and Dec 2014, and for all ad zones in 2015. –Dear Author

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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