Phuc Dat Bich to Facebook: Stop Shutting Down My Page! That"s My Real Name!

Phuc Dat Bich, an Australian man with a name so awesome that no one believes it’s real, has had it with Facebook shutting down his account.

The social media giant may boast one billion users, but the awkward veracity of PDB’s name still stands out enough to get flagged routinely.

His account has been suspended several times now, a fact he recently lamented in a post that went viral with over 200,000 Likes and Shares.

“I find it highly irritating the fact that nobody seems to believe me when I say that my full legal name is how you see it,” the 23-year-old said.

Bich goes on, “I’ve been accused of using a false and misleading name of which I find very offensive. Is it because I’m Asian? Is it?”

He included a photo of his passport, shown above.

“Having my fb shut down multiple times and forced to change my name to my ‘real’ name, so just to put it out there. My name.”

“Yours sincerely, Phuc Dat Bich.”

A few points worth noting here:

– It’s pronounced Fook Daet Bik in Vietnamese, at least according to the world wide Internets, not what anyone reading this is thinking.

– Phuc traditionally means “blessing.”

– Despite becoming an international story, this is still not as bad as some of the most absurd celebrity baby names of all time.

Nevertheless, Facebook, which requires users to “provide the name they use in real life” for security reasons, really needs to step up here.

Why not have a universal way to verify one’s account? It’s not like an authentication process doesn’t exist, or who gets to use it is even that selective.

If third-rate online journalists or Z-list celebrities like Taylor Lianne Chandler can somehow get the certified blue checkmark, why not Phuc Dat Bich?!

Or these people … just saying:

Bill Simmons: PISSED at ESPN For Shutting Down Grantland

Back in May, ESPN fired Bill Simmons unexpectedly, thus forcing sports fans everywhere (read: Boston) to go to Gisele Bundchen’s Twitter page in order to to read the boastful ramblings of someone who regularly fellates Tom Brady.

We kid Simmons, but he’s really one of the funniest and most insightful sports journalists working today, and he deserved better than to be unceremoniously canned in very public fashion. Now, ESPN has twisted the knife by shutting down Grantland, the irreverent sports and pop culture site that Simmons created in 2011.

Many of the site’s writers stated that they found out they’d been laid off only when they saw the network’s tweets about the site being suspended.

In a statement, ESPN said that it plans to honor the contracts of all current Grantland writers and hopes to hire many of them to write for other ESPN platforms.

So while several casualties of the move have lamented the end of the site, most of them have kept any outrage they may be feeling in check. But not Simmons:

“I loved everyone I worked with at G and loved what we built. Watching good/kind/talented people get treated so callously = simply appalling,” Simmons tweeted moments ago. 

The 46-year-old journalist has butted heads with ESPN many times over the course of his career. He was most recently suspended by the network last year for calling NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a “liar.”

His termination a few months later is believed to be the result of his tense relationship with network brass.

In a statement, ESPN claimed that the decision to shut down Grantland has nothing to do with Simmons or the nature of the site’s content, but was simply a result of the need to “direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.”

We’re sure Simmons will have more to say on the topic in the very near future.