Facebook For The World: ‘PublikFacebook’ Experiment Proves Interesting — To Say The Least

Facebook profiles generally belong to, or are managed by, a small group of people with a similar thought process or purpose. But what if the purpose of a Facebook profile was to see what a large group of individuals would create?

That was exactly the purpose for a recent Facebook profile created by Joe Veix, who writes for the blog Death and Taxes.

It was quite a creation while the Facebook profile lasted, to say the least.

Initially, Joe Veix created the Facebook profile as an experience to blog about on the website on July 9, 2015. To create the communal experience, Veix tweeted the login information and password to followers on Twitter.

The Facebook profile started with the name John Smith, but things quickly changed. As The Debrief reported, within the day, the new name on the Facebook profile was Maximilien Manning.

From there, things only took a turn for the crazy. Individuals logged on and started liking some strange pages. One user logged on to like around fifty pet cemetery pages.

Other users liked pages ranging from the Buffalo Bills, Stacy’s Mom, and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, to name a few.

Later, someone logged into the account and added eight life events for Maximilien, including naming Joe Veix as the PublikFacebook project’s father.

The updates – including photo and personas – became just as weird as the activity. Veix made a screen image of most of the Facebook profile’s photo changes into a video montage.

One of the funniest moments came when a user decided to add a job to the profile. The chosen profession was a customer service worker at Taco Bell. The Facebook profile was updated to the restaurant’s logo, and as Metro reported, one user went online to Taco Bell to answer customers’ complaints about service.

In all, Veix estimated that around 135 different log-ins took place with roughly around 100 unique users. The users hailed from several different locations, including exotic destinations such as Paris and Sweden. Other areas include Colombia, the United Arab Emirates, and New Jersey, reported Elite Daily.

The PublikFacebook project expanded to Twitter and Instagram, too. The Instagram version was not as active as Facebook had been, with around 74 posts before it permanently disabled. Twitter, on the other hand, was a hot mess from the start. After a few unremarkable tweets, a user logged in and started harassing another user (a teenage girl) through the site, as Sophos reported.

“I decided to shut it down,” Veix wrote of the Twitter account.

“Before I got the chance, Twitter locked the account for suspicious activity, right as I was screengrabbing the feed one last time for posterity.”

The fake Facebook profile lasted the longest, surviving around five days. In his blog on the experience, Veix attributed that to the profile acting like the ideal Facebook user.

“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 kind of virus, perfectly designed to take advantage of how Facebook operates.”

[Photo: Joe Veix Twitter – @joeveix]