Social media is a study every other time and interesting things pop up every day. It’s use projects several aspects about humans that wouldn’t have come out in the alternate. Joe Viex decided to have a social experiment: On Thursday, 10th of July, he decided to create and release the details of his Facebook account.
Complete with the username and password:
introducing PublikFacebook™: connecting the world, in a single open facebook account
— Joe Veix (@joeveix) July 9, 2015
log in today at http://t.co/tOEkiuRUD9 un: [email protected] pw: password1234 — Joe Veix (@joeveix) July 9, 2015
He was curious if a social media profile is supposed to reflect someone’s individuality. After publishing the details, in the first hour there was no activity. Then Pandora’s Box was opened.
The original name for the Facebook account was called John Smith. Some guy logged in and changed the name of the account to Maximilien Manning and also changed the profile and cover photos.
The bio was also changed, weirdly adding Joe Viex as Manning’s father. Max Manning then started to add friends, liking all of their posts and ended up liking over 322 pages. In an interesting twist, Max reviewed ISIS by giving a 5 star rating to the terror group ISIS.
Max continued with the rampage by updating the job status as a Customer Service Representative for a restaurant chain, Taco Bell and pretending to the social media representative for the company. Well, as fate would have it, there was a person who fell for the gag.
Yesterday, Facebook ended up closing the account according to a tweet he posted.
RIP pic.twitter.com/Kulb33wRJa
— Joe Veix (@joeveix) July 14, 2015
According to Joe, by Monday this week, there were 135 logins from all over the world, an average of 45 logins per day. He decided to try the same experiment on other social media platforms (his Twitter and Instagram accounts).
The Twitter account he uploaded was called publiktweets. Apparently people who logged in added bizarre photos while some harassed other users. He described that his timeline was like “4Chan on meth”. If you know 4Chan, you would understand his unlikely comparison. In comparison to his made up Twitter & Facebook accounts, the Instagram account flopped where he says “only seven posts were posted, most of which were just screengrabs of the account itself with various filters.”
This social experiment made him come up with several conclusions about social media use:
- Facebook is a “typical boring place” ended up being bizarre so fast. When he made that account communal “Behold, the dark heart of the feed. It’s like injecting pure uncut Facebook directly into your bloodstream” he said.
- A fake profile with 135 different logins had more “legitimacy” than the case of a certain Ethiopian activist who was running it under an alias.
- The Twitter experiment highlighted an endemic problem on the site: Harassment is still a major issue.
In my opinion, it displayed what people are capable of when they are operating under an alias. They become the worst version of themselves since no one knows their real identity. Facebook has been quite vocal about this and Zuckerberg highlighted the same sentiments in a AMA he did a while back.
But in another interesting twist, according to an interview with Buzzfeed, Joe was asked why he didn’t replicate the same experiment with Tumblr and responded he was overwhelmed in keeping track with the other accounts. He has released the login details for the Tumblr account: user name ([email protected]) password (password1234).
We’ll have to see how that will turn out. (Not well of course).
Source: Death and Taxes
