Who do you think you are deciding to change the address of a person living in the West Bank of Israel. That land is as much theirs as any other land taken by a victor in war after they were attacked.
Oh. My. God. I can’t tell you how many e-mails like this I’ve received over the past week. The e-mail above is just a small sample of the more sane e-mails I’ve received. I even had a death threat (woo hoo, my first!) that has since been reported to the authorities. Which is funny, because the only address I’ve changed recently is my own.
It took a very docile and well thought out e-mail by a Pastor Bill Randles to finally make me realize what was going on. It helped that he was the only person who both A) didn’t curse at me and B) realized FacebookTalk.com has no affiliation with Facebook.com.
Basically, Facebook started toying with people’s addresses in the West Bank. Initially, people were able to list themselves as residents of Israel. Recently, however, Facebook changed them to Palestine and despite the fact that Facebook now allows people in the area to pick either Israel or Palestine as their home country, I’m still getting daily e-mails from people who are beyond pissed. Did I mention I don’t work for Facebook? I can’t remember if I did or not….
People, it’s Facebook. If I was no longer allowed to pick the US as my home country and instead Facebook only allowed me to select Pluto as my residence, fine. I wouldn’t care! As long as I can still do things which Facebook is mainly used for, you know, like chatting with friends then I’m happy. If people have gotten to the point where they start sending death threats over a website that has nothing to do with the Middle East conflict changing location statuses, then the human race is in a pretty sad state of affairs.
At the same time, Pluto and the US haven’t been at war for the past few generations. Come on, Facebook. What the heck were you thinking here? Did you honestly think nobody would notice when you started changing the residency status of people in the West Bank against their will? It’s one of the most volatile regions in the world, what did you think would happen?
In the end, I can’t help but see this as another mishap in a series of mistakes made by Facebook in the past year or so. Somebody in the corporate office should have seen this coming before the change was made. Hopefully this will make them think twice if they decide to list Taiwan as part of China. Maybe they need to consider hiring a history and international relations major like myself to advise them on things like this.
Did you see what I did there? How I subtly hinted at the fact that while I’d love to, I’M NOT CURRENTLY EMPLOYED BY FACEBOOK! Haha, stop sending me angry e-mails as if I were the person who decided to cancel your account or change your profile!
