Facebook deletes all cosplayers' profiles, ensures own doom

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You may have noticed your facebook wall got a little less colorful yesterday, since Facebook decided to purge all accounts with "cosplay" in the profile name. Some users were warned, but not all. Friend lists, photos, and memories have been sucked down into the aether.

These cosplay profiles do not obey the terms of service, so Facebook is within their rights to delete all of these profiles. They are "fake," after all! However, given Facebook's current financial woes, it seems highly inadvisable for them to delete cosplayers, since they tend to be social networking power-users.

Folks with cosplay accounts tend to have tons of internet friends from far and away, hundreds of beautiful photos that those friends can't wait to look at over and over, plus a wealth of shares on posts of memes and videos. Talk about your ideal social networker!

Many cosplayers wish to keep their cosplayer identity separate from their "real" one, either to prevent getting harassed and found in real life by stalkers, or just to keep their lives as Batman separate from their professional lives. Instead of serving the need that Facebook users have for multiple profiles, or at the very least the need for more user-friendly privacy settings for photos and personal information, Facebook has issued a massive screw-you to a huge group of people who probably use Facebook more than anyone else in the history of time.

Google+ also suffered criticism of its insistence that participants use their real names. Pay attention, social networking executives: no one actually likes using the internet in this way, okay? We like pseudonyms. Cosplayers like them even more than the average person, because then we get to feel like superheroes. Let us be Batman when we want to be -- and Bruce Wayne the rest of the time. It's not doing you any harm, is it? Both profiles are equally real to us!

Instead of deleting the users who actually used their service to the max, maybe Facebook should focus more on getting rid of those free bots that companies buy to bolster their "likes." You know what I'm talking about: the profiles that are actually fake.