Facebook Is Lettting Some Idiot Steal My Identity

As The Frustrated Teacher I made a Facebook Profile (you can't see it anymore--hence this post).

As The Frustrated Teacher I made some Facebook Pages as well: It's The Poverty Stupid, Miseducation Nation, TFTRadio, and $tudent$Fir$t. I cannot post to them now. Read on.

Miseducation Nation (MN) was created by me way back in 2009 when NBC created Education Nation and then started deleting comments and banning people from their corporate reform Facebook Page. I blogged about it a few times. They sort of fixed it. Good for them, sort of.

Some time last year, I think, Facebook decided Miseducation Nation wasn't a Page, or whatever it was, and disabled it. We were up to nearly 10,000 likes. Once Facebook gave it back, we were at zero again, but well known enough that our purpose --to share the horrors of reform-- was being fulfilled.

As Facebook fucked with everything and everyone by making them re-categorize pages as communities or groups and demanding real names and the rest, my TFT profile came under scrutiny. I had begun TFT anonymously, so attaching my real name to the profile was less than desirable. I finally came out and subsequently added my real name, Richard Sugerman, to the profile as an AKA. Fine. No more trouble.

Things were going great. All of my blog posts were being syndicated via Networked blogs and things were super.

Earlier this year my Miseducation Nation co-admin, Sahila Changebringer, chose to leave due to circumstances that were totally cool. She worked harder than anyone keeping that MN page going and rebuilding it after FB screwed with it. Sahila is a hero, and the page was her doing--I basically gave it to her. But, she had to leave, so I had to take over again. Sahila deserved and got my deepest thanks. She still has it.

Once Sahila left I wanted help so I made a couple people co-admins. Thanks, folks.

A month or so ago some guy named Eric Morgan complained that the Teachers Rock Facebook page was deleting comments and banning people, just like NBC did with its Education Nation FB page. Eric was now a kindred spirit and a warrior for truth, like Sahila and me. I made him an admin of MN.

Eric Morgan was a bad admin. He started fights. He made MN look bad. I got complaints. I took away his admin rights. He didn't like that. He started making stupid comments that were divisive, so I finally banned him. Basically I learned that this idiot was a vindictive jerk.

Then, a few days ago I find another Miseducation Nation page with all my art and the MN name and logo which belong to me. The fucker  Eric Morgan had stolen my shit and was now posing as Miseducation Nation, but with a hyphen: Miseducation-Nation (notice his url -- IndoctrinationNation).

I wrote on his new, stolen page that he had stolen it and to please make the changes necessary to make clear his page in NOT actually Miseducation Nation, and he deleted the comment and banned me.

When I try to log in a day later as TFT, I can't. I am sure he reported me for something and Facebook has chosen to believe him, or Facebook has only bots so no human within Facebook management has any idea what is going on within their platform. Total fucking fail.

I have been searching Facebook for a remedy. I have reported this idiot. I have explained in forms to be submitted the story of his theft and how my TFT profile DOES have my real identity right there for all to see, and that my page and art have been stolen and my account frozen and deemed a Page, not a Profile.

Can't do what Facebook suggests

Once you click 'submit' on one of those FB official complaint forms you get a confirmation that says, "You will receive a reply shortly." Well, nothing has come. I still have no access to my TFT profile. They demand I turn it into a page. I will lose some stuff, but don't know what will be lost. FB says to download a copy of the profile before converting, but I can't because they demand I convert before I can have any access back. Once I convert to a page, the stuff I want to download will be gone. Conundrum.

Facebook and Eric Morgan have effectively silenced The Frustrated Teacher on Facebook. Why? Because Eric stole my shit. No, it's not fair, or right, or good. Fuck them both.

Moral: Get co-admins.

Facism: Jonah?

From futurist Sara Robinson comes this essay.

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.

And now we are...

Go read the whole piece. It's rather startling!