In an attempt to expose how easy it is to create a fake Facebook profile, a Dutch artist and his colleagues are unleashing an army of accounts on the social media platform named after British mercenaries who fought during the American Revolution.
The project is being called “The Possibility of an Army”, and according to BBC News and the Guardian, artist Constant Dullaart hopes that it will demonstrate just how easy it is to create fake identities on the Internet—even on sites like Facebook, which technically prohibits the practice.
Dullaart told the BBC than he and a team of volunteers are creating false accounts using the names of 18th-century men who were soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and plan to use them to add likes to various posts all across the social network in order to protest the “quantification of social capital”. He noted that he had not discussed his plans with Facebook.
“It might be that Facebook will notice and will start to kill them off,” he added. In the meantime, Dullaart said that he plans to recruit other artists and philosophers to decide what his virtual army (which currently numbers 1,000 but could ultimately become 20,000 strong) should do. He noted that he expect the project could last for as much as two months.
How easy is it to bypass online identity checks?
Dullaart’s project comes on the heels of a prior one in which the artist purchased fake Instagram accounts and had them follow 30 actual users from the art world, trying to boost each account up to 100,000 followers. It also follows a recent lawsuit filed by an online retailer against more than 1,000 Amazon review writers claiming that their reviews were “false” and “misleading.”
“There are already enormous armies of fake accounts,” Dullaart explained to The Guardian. “I get frustrated when I see social media quoted as validation of a cultural practice,” he said, noting that even museums have used false responses in improve their standing. Those offering this type of service, he said “make money by giving you big numbers. They generate random behavior so they look more real. And they’re all around.”
Dullaart said he and his colleagues are setting out to test how easy it is to bypass identity checks on a website like Facebook. They created phone-verified accounts using the names of actual but long-dead Hessian mercenaries who fought on the side of the British against the then-colonists during the American Revolutionary War.
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Feature Image: Constant Dullaart
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