Chinese activist furious at Facebook, which shut down his profile but kept that of Zuckerberg’s dog
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Who’s bigger on Facebook: A Chinese blogger and freedom of information activist ... or Mark Zuckerberg’s Hungarian sheepdog.
It’s looking like the latter, ever since Facebook deleted Michael Anti’s profile in January because the title is an alias.
Anti’s legal name is Zhao Jing, but he’s been known by the Michael Anti nom de plume for more than a decade, he told the Associated Press this week. Without his Facebook profile, which he’s had since 2007, he’s been isolated from a network of more than 1,000 contacts.
Back in 2005, Microsoft shut down Anti’s blog after being pressured by Chinese officials. Anti said that bloggers and social media activists in China often operate under false names to avoid trouble from authorities.
But what really stings, he said, is that Facebook founder Zuckerberg’s dog Beast still has a toehold in the social networking site. But because the pooch’s page is set up as a “public figure” profile, he can skirt the pseudonym ban.
And so it is that Anti, who has been a fellow at both Cambridge and Harvard universities, has fewer visitors than Beast, whose public wall features more than 2,500 “likes” on posts such as: “I just took a dump and made Mark Zuckerberg pick it up. It was glorious.”
“I’m really, really angry,” Anti told the AP. “I can’t function using my Chinese name.... My journalistic work and academic work is more real than a dog.”
RELATED:
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg visits China
Father of China’s ‘Great Firewall’ is unrepentant
China tries to stamp out ‘Jasmine Revolution’
-- Tiffany Hsu [follow]
