Rowan Sporg

What puzzles me most is how fat it happened. The account was locked within 15 minutes of being created. The only information I had entered was that I attended Hunter High and Hillcrest College. I had not put up any pictures and had not posted anything at all, let alone anything about SL. I would think it would have been very unlikely that a user would have stumbled on the account and reported it. Even if a user saw it, I doubt they would suspect it belonged to an avatar, since there was no reference to SL and no pictures of avatars. Hunter High and Hillcrest College could raise suspicion, but it would be mild because there are RL institutions with those names. I'm guessing it was done automatically by software. Having both Hunter High and Hillcrest College on it could contribute, but I'm thinking the major trigger was sending friend requests to three avatars and no one else. I also wonder if the reason FB leaves some of the avatar accounts alone is that it is using them as bait to identify new avatar accounts like mine. Any more thoughts?

A year or so ago, Facebook closed my account and a lot of others belonging to SL avatars because we were not real people. I made a page for a fictional character, but it's not much use because I can't have friends. Yesterday, I decided that I would open another Facebook account using a different email address, intending to put nothing on the page to indicate that I was a SL avatar. I opened it and searched for some of my old avatar friends. I found several, all of whom have never had their accounts closed. I sent friend requests to three of them. Then FB locked me out and a message popped up saying that someone had reported that I was not a real person, so my account was locked. Later, on my RL account, I looked to see how many accounts that obviously belonged to SL avatars I could find. There were too many to count. Does anyone have any idea why FB is very attentive to preventing some avatars, like me, from having accounts, but seemingly is content to leave others alone indefinitely. When I had an account, I never did anything offensive, so it can't be related to behavior. While we're talking about it, why do you think FB doesn't want avatars to have accounts? Sure, someone pretending to be a real person that they are not is a problem. But why is it a problem when it is obvious that the accountholder is an avatar and is not trying to deceive anyone. After all, an avatar account brings eyeballs to ads just the same as a RL person's account.