An Indianapolis based bankruptcy attorney, named Mark Steven Zuckerberg, is suing Meta over repeated confusion with CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg.
“I’m Mark Steven. And he’s Mark Elliot,” the attorney told Indianapolis local news agency 13News.
The attorney is suing Meta for negligence and breach of contract, saying that Facebook shuts down his pages for using a “false name” and “impersonating a celebrity.”
The attorney’s business account has allegedly been suspended five times in the last eight years, and his personal account has been shut down four. Zuckerberg (the attorney) says it keeps happening despite many back-and-forth emails and apologies from Meta.
Meta told Gizmodo it has since reinstated his account.
“We have reinstated Mark Zuckerberg’s account, after finding it had been disabled in error,” a spokesperson said. “We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued patience on this issue and are working to try and prevent this from happening in the future.”
After each suspension, the attorney says that it takes him months to retrieve his account. Last time, it took him six months. Going months at a time without his Facebook account for his legal practice has allegedly cost him thousands of dollars in advertising and communication with clients.
“They have more money and more lawyers and more resources than I do. I’d rather not pick a fight with them, but I don’t know how else to make them stop!” the lawyer told the station. “For somebody who purports to be one of the leading tech companies in the world, and they can’t stop doing this? And they can’t seem to get their appeal process to work? I think they have a problem.”
The attorney is asking for restitution —and a week on Zuckerberg’s yacht
The attorney is now asking Meta to restore his suspended Facebook accounts for good and pay him back for the fees and the ad money he lost in the suspended months. He is confident that he will win the lawsuit.
“It’s not funny,” he said. “Not when they take my money. This really pissed me off.”
He says that he would also accept a personal apology from Zuckerberg, the CEO.
“If he wants to fly here personally and say ‘I’m sorry,’ or maybe let me spend a week on his boat to say I’m sorry, I’d probably take him up on that,” the attorney said.
Not Meta’s first name-related controversy
The lawsuit is rather first of its kind, but it is not Meta’s first controversy with Facebook naming policies.
Facebook was at the center of numerous protests in the early 2010s over its real-name policies. The conflicts at the time were dubbed “the nymwars” (nym as in pseudonym).
Facebook got a lot of heat for suspending accounts that used preferred names instead of their government-recognized names, including transgender users and drag performers. In a high profile instance, Facebook suspended famous novelist Salman Rushdie’s accounts and reinstating him as “Ahmed Rushdie,” his legal name that the author has never went by in the public eye.
The policy also targeted Native American names at the time. In late 2015, Facebook caved after years of criticism and changed its real-name policy to allow users to provide context for special circumstances.
English (US) ·