We all know by this point that Facebook really wants you to use your real identity on its social network. It says that creates a sense of trust and liability for comments and other content shared. It also makes the data it harvests a whole lot more valuable to know its based on a real individual.
However, according the Beeb, Dutch artist Constant Dullaart is in the process of creating an army of up to 20,000 fake profiles. There are around 1,000 on the platform already and all of them are based on real people who were in the Hessian army from the late 1700s.
Rather than creating fake profiles to then set-up a business profiting from them, Dullaart says he’s trying to raise awareness and start a discussion around “quantification of social capital.” Volunteers will be distributing ‘likes’ from the profiles on other content, with the idea being to highlight people and content that might not otherwise be noticed.
Creating a legion of fake accounts is, of course, against Facebook’s rules, and it’ll be closing the profiles down as quickly as Dullaart can open them, though he hopes the project could last up two months.
I’d imagine that it won’t make it that far – hell, Facebook doesn’t even like you using a fake name to escape the potential for abuse, just for being yourself.
It has recently said that it’s once again looking at changing the rules to ease some of the problems, though.
Naturally, we’ve asked the company for a statement and will update here with any response.
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