Responsible employee, trend-setting social influencer, fun-loving party goer — we wear many hats in our day-to-day lives and social media, for better or for worse, asks us to choose one.
The image you present to your friends may be very different from the image you present to your colleagues and coworkers, and here, having a single online profile can be problematic.
Profile limitations also pose a problem for marketers and entrepreneurs, as the potential of social network shares grows. Organic shares, tweets, likes, and reposts are one of the best ways to grow your brand, and many use multiple profiles to do this. With the requirements that each profile be verified by a separate email address and phone number, however, the extent to which this strategy can be employed is limited.
In this post, we will look into the question of why Facebook does not allow multiple personal accounts and — more importantly — how you can get around these constraints to regain control over your online identities, strengthen your organic seeding approach. We will also discuss how digital fingerprints expose multiple accounts on Facebook and the best privacy software tools to get around them.
Facebook, globally the most used social network, got its start as a community-building tool targeted for students and required users to verify their identity using their school email address. Those days of Facebook (for the minority that remembers them) are long gone, but the community vision remains. For that reason, through many other changes the platform has seen, Facebook has stuck to its policy of allowing just one account per user.
Facebook Community Standards clearly forbid multiple personal profiles. A personal profile on the social network is for non-commercial use, to be used by a real individual. If someone reports one of your profiles as suspicious or if there are other red flags, Facebook may lock you out of that profile and ask for proof of your identity. If found to be “inauthentic,” administrators can shut it down permanently.
Using multiple personal profiles with a certain level of social following and trust provide endless opportunities for marketing and organic content seeding. You can communicate different messages from varied perspectives, engage your target audiences in more open conversation, and advertise your brand indirectly.
This is the same tactic that foreign governments have employed to shift public opinion on important issues abroad, as the past year of Russia probes by the UK and US have revealed. In light of these issues, Facebook has strengthened their oversight of coordinated user activity even more in order to prevent the platform from becoming a vehicle for foreign political influence.
No Facebook account can be used without verification via a phone number and email. As a bulk creator dealing with dozens or hundreds of profiles, this can be both time-consuming and a practical challenge.
Typically, there are two ways of doing this. The first is to buy pre-created accounts from a bulk register; the second is to register them yourself.
If choosing the first option, it is essential to make sure that these accounts each have different names and were registered with different phone numbers. Furthermore, the IP location has to correspond with the region noted in the user’s profile. Once the technical aspects are taken care, the challenge of making the profiles themselves appear genuine remains: each profile needs to have profile photos and friends lists containing at least some active profiles.
Outsourcing the registration to the third parties streamlines the process and adds a certain amount of social capital and credibility to the profiles. On the other hand, you can never be sure that these accounts won’t be shut down for some reason, for example, due to logins from the same device and IP address. Unknowingly purchasing hacked accounts is also a danger, so you have to investigate their origins before purchase.
If you choose to create multiple accounts by yourself, these are the steps you have to complete:
- confirm email address
- confirm phone number linked to the profile
- set profile names and basic information
- upload photos
Services like Phantom, which gets verification codes on overseas phone numbers and confirm emails automatically, can help quite a bit here.
During the registration and later on when you actively use these accounts, Facebook still can detect multiple personal accounts by using digital fingerprints. These are registered every time you’re active online and can expose your web browser’s identity. This information can be traced through the following attributes:
- IP address
- JavaScript information
- Java Applet
- HTML5 Canvas
- Content Filters
- Geolocation API
- Flash Player Runtime properties
- Silverlight Plug-In
- WebGL Support
- Pure-CSS Media Queries
- Cross-origin login on major social networks
Each of these parameters can expose various unique or non-unique browser fingerprints. For example, JavaScript information can disclose User-Agent, Architecture, OS Language, System Time, Screen Resolution of the device. Flash Player can track Flash Version, Plugin Type, Operating System, System Language, Web Browser Architecture, and others.
The good news is that there are many software tools that help retain online privacy and prevent your exposure by stopping digital fingerprint spoofing. It should be noted that VPN software and plugins that stop fingerprinting provide only a partial solution, blocking only certain types of attributes. Solutions based on the Tor network, on the other hand, cannot be used for many types of online activity, as they do not support JavaScript extensions. Tools like Kameleo that mimic new fingerprints of your digital identity provide the best solution. Here, you maintain the best Internet security without compromising the functionality of your browser.
Multiple personal accounts can provide people with greater control over their online identity and be a boon for entrepreneurs looking to organically grow their online presence. The reality, however, is that Facebook Community Standards don’t allow multiple personal accounts and the company’s ability to enforce this makes for a time-consuming workaround.
Preventing the detection of digital fingerprints can be the hardest point to manage. In our next post, we’ll compare Kameleo and other available software tools that address this issue specifically, empowering you to retain control over browser fingerprinting while you register and post on these Facebook profiles.
