Last I tried (1-3yrs ago? don't quite remember), no. They needed a phone number, so I added a VOIP phone number and was informed that I needed a phone number tied to a real phone. I went out and bought a cheap phone so I could make the bloody account, and while I could make and receive calls just fine Facebook still treated it as if it weren't a "real" phone. Long story short, I never made that account, I briefly enjoyed the perks of a burner phone, and I turned the phone into a small web server.

You can get IDless SIM cards overseas still. E.g. Colombia.

They probably don't have the infra set up (yet) to detect they are such SIM cards.

Given how pervasive Facebook tracking is, I'd bet on your pseudonymous account being linked to your shadow profile very quickly. There is no anonymity when Facebook is involved.

I'd also strongly object to moving the needle even the tiniest amount on Facebook's metrics. They wouldn't force users to do this unless it benefitted them; that's plenty enough reason for a lot of people.

Especially considering that VR devices film your whole room constantly, I think I will never connect my Rift again.

In short, no. Facebook has gotten very good at catching and deleting "fake" accounts. Back in the day, I worked on an application that used Facebook's Graph API and I needed to create some bogus accounts for testing, but they were consistently blocked within days.

Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.

That might be what they tell investors but I disagree that they've gotten good at policing accounts. I moderate a large Facebook group and we get flooded with join requests from obviously fake users all the time. Most of them have a handful of southeast Asia friends, some random highly geographically distributed friends in the English speaking world, and stock or stolen photos. The real giveaway is the programmatic nonsense responses they give to the membership questions. I've been reporting these accounts to Facebook a long time and they persist, often with join dates making them multiple years old.

> Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.

They're not very good at that. A pretty big chunk of people I have as friends have fake names, some of them even after me reporting their names for being fake.

Real names don't matter to social networks. You are you because your behavior is your behavior no matter what the attached label is, and no one bothers to change that for a “fake” account. However, real names are great at keeping the naive crowds deluded about social networks being tools for “personal” communications with “real” “friends”.

> me reporting their names for being fake

So how does it feel to be in a punitive squad? Do they at least pay you well for all the atrocities?

Why did you report them?

It's somewhat annoying when people on FB are unrecognizable due to name/profile picture changes. I don't especially like FB in general, and would consider it a positive if FB enforcing their T&C caused people to leave the platform. (Or if it forced a change in the T&C.) The people I've reported are aware of my feelings.

fwiw, facebook has gotten upset with me when i've tried this exact thing, usually demanding a phone number or email, and refusing contact info i've already provided for other sock accounts. sometimes they'll lock my socks for not acting "human" (never posting anything, no profile picture, etc). just gives me an excuse to care less about facebook in all honesty