Leaving the 21st century without Facebook

EDIT: Emil Steiner of the Washington Post interviewed me about this and blogged about it.

Once again, I'm sorry for not posting in so long. It's not like I have a very large blog reading base. However, I should definately post more often. It is also nice to just get my thoughts out at times.

As you may have noticed, my last post was titled "Joining the 21st century with Facebook". This post regards to me leaving the 21st century without Facebook.

If you wish to read no further and have a short-story style conclusion, it is that I was kicked from Facebook due to being a home schooler.

Those of you who seem to want more detail, have read this far. A little further, and you can get the whole story.

After joining Facebook, I became fairly facinated with it. People I had not communicated with in years added me as friends, and there were groups for everything. From Peavey T-40 fans, to raw foodists, it had everything. Asside from a few hitches on the account creation, it was a fairly impressive site with an utterly massive userbase.

All was going well... until I got a warning on my account that it would be disabled unless a member of my school network verified my account.

I did nothing wrong, broke no rules, and had probably a quarter of the cpu-consuming applets on my profile than most people have. I also spent time uploading three photos, and filling out their profile information. I even blogged about joining Facebook, so they really had nothing against me.

Now, going back a number of weeks before this. When I registered, because I am under 18, I was required to join a school network. It had a fancy autocompletion field that would suggest schools as you typed. I tried to do "homeschool", because I am homeschooled (if you do not know what that is, it will be explained later in this post). Homeschool was not a "valid" option, but there were a couple of "homeschool" schools, and none of which applied to me. After fiddling with it for a little while having no success with trying to get just "homeschool" or a blank field to work, I decided to try "Hendersonville High", as I live in Hendersonville, NC. After selecting it, everything went fine, until my dilema I mentioned earlier.

I don't actually know anyone from "Hendersonville High", but I assumed things would be fine. Later on in my Facebook excursion, I stumbled upon a "Facebook should add 'homeschool' as a network" group. The group had the discusions forum closed by the staff, effectively stopping people from talking about the matter. They posted a notice on the group page stating that if you simply gave them your homeschool email domain, school name, and all sorts of other information that would apply to a 'normal' school, they could add it to their options. I was only able to merely "join" the group, and wondered a little bit as to why things where that way. I still did not see any chance of my only social networking account being disabled.

However, there is a problem with what Facebook seems to understand about homeschool. Homeschoolers almost always do not have dedicated email domains, official school buildings, or even teachers other than their parents (although in my case, I have a different math teacher). I have a more through description in my email transcript with Facebook support below, and you can always google if you do not know what homeschooling is.

Facebook implements what I think is a strange and 'hackish' security/lawsuit protection method. Any over age 18 does not need to be confirmed by a member of any network. And even without registering, I kept my account for a good month or more. I think that they think they will curb down on "child predators" by forcing people from schools be confirmed, but in reality people can re-register for one month accounts, or simply claim to be older than 18. Perhaps there is a different reason, but this is the only half-valid plausible thought that comes to mind.

So after recieving my account deactivation notice, I emailed Facebook's support and was not very happy with the outcome.

Here is the transcript:

From me:

My account currently says it will be deleted soon if I do not get my membership to the Hendersonville Highschool network verified. I had to use this network, because I am homeschooled and was not able to specify so. I have joined the "Facebook should have a homeschool network" group, and have read the message that the staff posted. I understand that you are doing the best you can to keep off malicous people with ill intentions. However, people can sign up as being above the age of 18 and not have to verify. They can also sign up as unverified for many weeks to most school networks. You will never filter out all of the ill-intented people, but it is common sense that people should follow for this. I really enjoy Facebook and think that it is setup quite well. However, as of now my account will be deleted because of a "hackish", and easily bypassable safety implementation.

I also read "However, if your homeschool provides an email address to its students, please let us know, and we will investigate the possibility of adding itas a network. These email domains are an alternate way for us to verify an affiliation with a school." from the message the staff posted.

The problem with what was written, is that home school is almost always 'school at home'. Classmates are usually just siblings, and our own parents are the teachers. We don't have different buildings, or recieve funds from the government. We rarely even have a school name, and certainly don't have an email domain for the homeschooling.

Please consider adding a "Homeschool" or "Other" school network. Facebook is a great site, but this is a major thing hindering it. The amount of homeschoolers increases daily, and it will become a more common thing in the future.

Thanks,
Teran McKinney

From their support:

Hi Teran,

Thanks for the suggestion. We will certainly keep it in mind as we continue to improve the site.

Your account has been disabled because you have not registered with the high school that you attend. We'll try to reactivate your account with the correct high school, but we may not yet support your network. In order to assist you, we'll need you to reply to this email with the following information:

Full Name of your School
City
State/Country
School's website
Graduation Year

Unfortunately, at this time, Facebook does not support most homeschool networks. Our high school networks are based around a model of community verification. Because of their size, homeschools are inherently hard to prove an affiliation with.

However, if your homeschool provides an email address to its students, please let us know, and we will investigate the possibility of adding it as a network. These email domains are an alternate way for us to verify an affiliation with a school. You will need to email us from this school affiliated address and tell us the name and location of the homeschool.

I'm sorry if our policies on this matter present any inconvenience. In the future, we will consider new ways to integrate homeschools into the site. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Mitch
User Operations
Facebook

From me:

Thank you for replying to my email.

I understand how the current network setup is done. My high school is done at home. There is no name of my school, but it is recognized by the state. In documents where a name is required, we call it "McKinney Academy", but it truly has no name. The schooling is done at my home: 230 Echo Drive, Hendersonville, NC, USA. My graduation year is 2009, as is listed on my Facebook profile. My mom, dad, and a friend directly teach me, and thus there is no website or email domain. I know that this is different from normal Facebook policy and methodology, but please try to understand.

Thanks,
Teran

From "Mitch":

Hi Teran,

Regretfully, I am unable to reinstate your account. I'm sorry if our policies on this matter present any inconvenience. In the future, we will consider new ways to integrate homeschools into the site. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Mitch
User Operations
Facebook

Well, I will leave it at that. You can make sense of their actions and mine, and come to a conclusion. Frankly, after this I am not that bothered about losing my account, but I guess it would be kind of nice to have it.

Thanks for reading this post.

Cheers!