How to create a fake Facebook account

Creating multiple Facebook accounts used to be easy. You may have needed a secondary email from a legitimate educational institution, but it’s usually not difficult to come by – especially if you get a new alumni email address that is sent to a university’s domain after graduation is bound.

If you’re trying to create a new Facebook account these days, there are many more areas to jump through because of the mechanisms Facebook uses to keep people from breaking their Terms of Service. Why would you want another Facebook account at all? Above all, the “delete Facebook!” Kinja commentators pile up in this article. There are actually a couple of good reasons why you might need a “fakebook”.

Stop being the real you on Facebook

The first and most obvious reason is that having a fake account can disconnect you from all the information Facebook has on you. Sure, deleting your Facebook account and restarting might work too – if you can at all. I confess I have never tried to delete my account right away and see if I can set up a new account with the same email address and phone number. If I know Facebook, I suspect it is likely to be very difficult, if not impossible.

You can’t escape the various ways Facebook can find out who you are using a dummy account, including what you use to crawl the website and where you are. However, you can at least handle key identifiers from Facebook’s separate ones. This includes your real email address, phone number, relationships, contacts, who you talk to, interests, etc.

No more distractions (and annoyances) of Facebook

A Fakebook account gives you full control over what you see on your feed. You will no longer be triggered by the stupidity of your friends’ political beliefs, nor will you have to look at endless streams of pet photos and / or newborn updates. Since you haven’t befriended anyone in your fake account, you can basically turn it into some sort of RSS reader for other companies you want to know: when your favorite band announces their next tour, when a certain creator releases a new set of Dungeons Dice or if there is a sale at a specific local company.

Use the hardware from Facebook

I’m sure you’ve read Facebook’s Byzantine rules for the Oculus hardware by now. If not, here is the short version: You will to have to link a Facebook account to your virtual reality headset and use it. Yes, that’s totally absurd politics, but that’s the new normal as far as the Oculus is concerned.

Of course, this also means that you cannot bind your Oculus headset to a Facebook account Clear said account if you are no longer interested in a social profile. If you do this, you will lose all the apps you bought for your headset and you will no longer be able to buy any more apps. If your Facebook account is ever removed from Facebook for violating the Terms of Service, your Oculus headset will suffer a similar fate.

But hey, at least you can now use multiple headsets with one Facebook account and use Not be banned. Sigh.

How do I create another Facebook account?

Here’s the hard part. Facebook has gotten a lot better at account verification these days. If they suspect you’re up to something, they won’t be able to create a secondary account. What I mean? Let’s go through the process.

Since we’re trying to keep things super anonymous, the first thing I did was pull up an incognito window on my browser. Before we start, a quick note: I don’t route my traffic through a VPN to further separate my real IP from Facebook. It’s not a bad idea, but I suspect Facebook also knows some VPN IP ranges, which makes the point disputed.

Screenshot: David Murphy

Facebook will ask you for the usual laundry list with details. I would advise you to use a different name, email address, and birthday than anything you use on your real Facebook account. Don’t use a phone number. Seems smart, doesn’t it? You will then receive a code to confirm your email:

Screenshot: David Murphy

If you’re lucky, this is it! That’s all you need to do to get your brand new account up and running. However, it is also possible that Facebook will ask for additional confirmation that you are who you are telling who it is before you can use the service. This includes uploading a headshot to verify that you are a real person. Presumably, Facebook does this through its facial recognition tools. If the company thinks the picture is already linked to another Facebook account, you’re out of luck.

What do I mean by that? I don’t work at Facebook, but I can only assume that the company’s tool is looking for obviously fake pictures – like trying to convince Facebook that a picture of Sylvester Stallone is actually you – or a picture that with multiple images of matches every other account on duty. So if you are trying to play the system using a friend’s picture but Facebook has already linked many pictures of that person’s face to another account, you are out of luck.

You have a secondary Facebook account. What now?

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook is pretty good at profiling you based on all kinds of information that you may not even know you are providing to the company. Case in point: even in an incognito browser window that I can’t access in my normal browser, Facebook still knew something was there something Type of correlation between my secondary account and my primary account. As a result, it suggested that I befriend some friends on my main account – which shouldn’t be possible if this was really a brand new account created in “anonymity” – and had very specific suggestions on how I could would like to fill in the first details of my profile.

If this doesn’t make your hair edgy just yet, it should be. Because if you are using a secondary Facebook account, you should be absurdly diligent to keep your life as separate as possible between the two. If Facebook turns the association that you are fake into a real human, it will most likely get the fake account and ban it possibly Act against your real one.

What does that mean? Well, put on your aluminum foil hat. If I were to use a fake account on Facebook, I would set it up like this:

• I would associate this fake account with a device I’d never used to interact with Facebook before – like an older smartphone.
• I would activate a VPN whenever I access Facebook on this device (and you can’t slip or Facebook will notice that you are accessing the account from the same location as your normal Facebook account).
• Just in case, I would choose a VPN server that is close to where I usually live. (We only care about the different IP address.)
• I wouldn’t do something on my fake Facebook account, which I usually do on my real one. Don’t befriend yourself. Don’t befriend your friends. Don’t associate identifying details – like the same phone number – with two accounts.
• I would disable any feature or service on my Fakebook account that I knew I wouldn’t use. This includes everyone being able to see that you are online, tag you in photos without your consent, send you friend requests, or use other identifying information like your email address or phone number to see who you are. Basically, the goal is to remove, disable, or hinder as many normal social functions from Facebook as possible.
• I would not assign this Facebook account to any other service. Don’t use it to log into anything. Don’t play games on it. Don’t do anything with it. It is a glorified RSS reader. nothing more.
• I would “use” the account in the sense that I could fill the profile with reasonable, if dummy, information so that it doesn’t look spammy. But please Not Upload a picture of you to the wrong account. Don’t upload anything.

It is generally assumed that your new Facebook account can be deleted at any time. As part of this, I would recommend not connecting to your new virtual reality headset if you are actively using a different primary Facebook account. The risk seems too great to me. You don’t want to lose access to all of the games you paid for if or when Facebook figures out your little scheme.

I think you can be little More liberal in using your new account if you have previously deleted your old primary Facebook account. I can’t imagine Facebook freaking out too much about it, but that’s just an assumption on my part. If you leave Facebook, why should you recreate a brand new profile? Just reactivate the old one and delete friends, groups, associations or whatever else you need to crop them as you like. Annoying as it is, at least you don’t have to worry that one day Facebook will delete both accounts out of the blue.