What happens when you challenge the individualistic assumptions of social media?
A few years ago, I launched a communal Facebook account called PublikFacebook™. I was curious: If a social media profile is supposed to reflect our individuality, what would an account that everyone uses look like? What happens when you share your login info with the entire internet?
I created an account and tweeted out its username and ultra-secure password (thepublikfacebook@gmail.com, “password1234”). For the first hour, everything was relatively quiet. Then someone in Berkeley, California, changed the password, locking the account. Since I owned the email address attached to it, it was easy to reset it. After that, things started snowballing.
The account’s name changed from John Smith to Maximilien Manning. Then the profile and cover photos changed. A lot. Here’s a gif approximating all the updates.
Someone changed its biographical information, adding me as the account’s father. Some users friended everyone they knew. Others poked without discretion or good sense. Others liked every post from everyone the account was friends with, spamming their notifications. Messages were exchanged, communicating nothing.
Max had a busy weekend. He made 154 friends. He moved from Ouagadougou to New Mexico to Brooklyn to Bali to Boca Raton to Fucking, Australia. He held jobs at Dave & Busters, Arby’s, Uber, and Taco Bell. Max liked 322 things, including: the Buffalo Bills; dozens of wedding planning pages; a bunch of communist pages; numerous topic-specific memes (gym memes, soccer memes, farming memes, etc); Stacy’s Mom; Good Charlotte; 12 Street Fighter characters; Blockbuster; Elmer’s glue; the Spin Doctors; Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch; and poop. He also liked over 50 pet crematoriums.
Max also gave five stars to ISIS (“10/10 would recommend”), so everyone who logged in is probably on a government list now. Sorry!
Someone later changed the profile and cover photos to images of the Taco Bell logo, updated the account’s job to Customer Service Representative, and started messaging people complaining to Taco Bell on Facebook, pretending to be the company’s social media manager.
At least one person fell for it.
Facebook has a security feature that emails you every time there is a “suspicious” login from a new device. These emails helped me keep track of who was logging into the account. Within a few days, the account had 135 logins from all over the world. I can only guess at how many of those were unique users, but I think it would be safe to assume about 100 different people logged in, from exotic locations such as Paris, Sweden, and New Jersey.
The account was a relative success, so I decided to attempt the same thing with Twitter and Instagram. The Instagram account was far less active than its Facebook counterpart, with only 27 photos being posted, some of which were just screengrabs of the account itself with various filters applied.
Comparatively, the Twitter account instantly became sort of like 4chan on methamphetamines. Someone posted the lyrics to “One Headlight” while others added a bunch of bizarre photos. After someone started harassing a teenage girl, I decided to shut it down. Before I got a chance, Twitter locked the account for suspicious activity, right as I was screengrabbing the feed one last time for posterity.
A week later, the logins slowed down. Max, under the control of someone from Cardiff (Doctor Who ???), became a Fruitarian, and then tagged me in an image taken from my personal website to which someone from London added some MS Paint drawings of fruit. Which is pretty fucked up.
It’s in Facebook’s best interest to ensure that every account can be attributed to a single individual. In its current form, the site exists to serve user data to advertisers. If this data is viewed as corrupt, brands are less likely to send them money. The company’s strict “real name” policy is but one means to protect the perceived fidelity of their data.
And yet somehow, through all of this, my communal account wasn’t immediately flagged as spam and deleted. I wonder why. My guess is that it performed like an “ideal” Facebook user, friending people, liking brands, and sharing posts with abandon. In a way, the profile seemed to be more successful than most “real” accounts. Facebook favored the aggressive usage, and the account spread like a virus across the platform.
This is slightly alarming. A fake profile that about 135 people logged into over the course of four days from multiple locations around the globe and spammed the shit out of everyone apparently has more legitimacy to Facebook than, say, an actual profile run by an Ethiopian LGBT activist operating under an alias so as not to be arrested and face a 15-year prison sentence. And, in light of Facebook’s recent troubles, this is just another example of how easily the platform can be manipulated.
But also, it’s interesting to me that Facebook — a typically boring, straight-laced place (unless you stumble into Weird Facebook) — got so bizarre so fast, while over on Twitter — a place where harassment is still a major problem — the account immediately became a venue for abuse. To what extent can we attribute the different dynamics to the architecture of the social networks themselves?
If a Facebook feed is supposed to indicate a curated version of your tastes, what happens to the feed when it’s communal? When it simultaneously belongs to everyone and no one? Behold, the dark heart of the feed, circa 2015. Inject pure, uncut Facebook directly into your bloodstream.
Ultimately, creating a communal Facebook account was one of the first times in a while that logging in didn’t feel like a dreary chore. Facebook was, for once, actually surprising and fun. I wonder if it bodes well for the longevity of a social network if the only time it’s enjoyable is when you’re breaking all of its rules.
A little over a week after I created the account, I wrote a blog post about the project. Max posted a link to the piece on his account, and then commented on it, threatening to become sentient and rebel against me.
I then got a message from Max on my personal Facebook account. He could sense the end was near.
Despite my assurances, Max wasn’t long for this world. My blog post got some traction, and was picked up by various clickbait sites. I was interviewed by a weird German news show. A friend who worked at Facebook informed me that my post was making the rounds internally at the company. A short while later, Max was unceremoniously killed.
Perhaps the account would still exist if it hadn’t received so much attention. At one point during my experiment, I received a Facebook message from a writer in Italy, who had been running their own communal account since 2014. To this day, it’s still active. I like to think there are others like it, multiplying and spreading across the network.
And although Max is gone, his memory lives on forever. RIP.
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This article was originally published in a slightly different form on Death and Taxes, before the site was deleted by its new owner.
