A Vietnamese man living in Melbourne who claimed that that Facebook discriminated against him over his unfortunate name 'Phuc Dat Bich' has announced that it was all a big hoax.
Several months ago the man had posted a screenshot of an Australian passport that appeared to show his full legal name was in fact Phuc Dat Bich.
He had claimed that his Facebook account had been shut down multiple times after the social media site accused him of “using a false and misleading name”.
Phuc Dat Bich aka Joe Carr aka.....
The post then went viral last week with media outlets around the world publishing the story, raising plenty of chuckles and innuendo laden headlines over the poor man's phonetically-misfortunate sounding name.
Alas, it was all too good to be true. In a new post, the man still said it was all a prank intended to fool the media and highlight shortcomings of Facebook’s “real name” policy.
In the post he said that "people should be free to use any name they desire". He said that "What started out as a joke between friends became a prank that made a fool out of the media and brought out the best in the people who reached out to me."
He signed the post Joe Carr, an obvious pun on 'Joker'.
Facebook has come in for criticism in the past over its name policy. An online campaign was launched to get the site to recognise the name of the Co. Limerick parish of Effin after Facebook originally deemed it "offensive".
They also had to backtrack on a policy of not allowing Drag Queens use their stage names and more seriously, last week a woman named "Isis" had her account suspended.
