Last Thursday, 27-year-old writer and artist Joe Veix decided to introduce something he called ‘PublikFacebook’ which something that he claimed, on his Twitter page, would be something that would be “connecting the world, in a single open Facebook account.” On the site that Velix writes for, he stated, “If a social media profile is supposed to reflect our individuality, what would an account that everyone uses even look like?”
Shortly after posting the username and password for his new open account, someone decided to take matters into their own hands and change the password. Veix quickly reset the password. This is where it started getting weird.
Somebody changed the profile’s name from John Smith to Maximilien Manning and started changing the profile and cover photo and began liking some really random stuff.
Check out the John/Max profile and how it drastically changed over the weekend.
In Velix’s article he said “Max liked 322 things, including: the Buffalo Bills; dozens of wedding planning pages; something like 50 pet crematoriums; 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.” Shockingly, someone under the “Max” account gave ISIS five stars and said “10/10 would recommend”
By Sunday, Veix decided to branch out to Twitter and Instagram with his new “experiment” after receiving over 100 different users from around the world. Unfortunately, no one really cared much about the Instagram, but Twitter took a turn for the worst. Veix had to shut it down after he found out that someone had began cyber-bullying a teenage girl.
Sadly, yesterday morning, Facebook decided to “kill off” Max and disabled the account. In his interview with Buzzfeed, Veix stated that one thing that he got from this experience was “For the most part, these sites are just tool that allow us to create/access networks, and we get out of them largely what we put into them.”
I thought that this experiment was marked for trouble from the beginning. If you give the entire world creative control over something like this, people are going to take advantage and do some really crazy and weird stuff. Especially since it’s anonymous, people are going feel like they can do whatever they want without consequence because you don’t know who they are.
Let’s not try anything like this again, okay?
[Images via]
A Guy Made An Open Facebook Account And Things Got Weird Fast
