Art professor impersonated tea party activist, staged Facebook hacking, calls it ‘performance art’

Lacey Bassett teaches web design at Provo College and works as a graduate-level instructor at the University of Utah. Her effort to blend in with conservatives apparently began in April 2010, when she tweeted about “infiltrating [a] Tea Parting gathering.” Two months later, she used her own email address to register the domain name “Liber-Tea.com.”


This image was posted on the website Monadelhirst.com following a March 22 performance art event which was advertised as a hacking attack on a tea party activist’s Facebook page.

A Utah college professor helped create and cultivate a fake identity as a tea party activist for nearly two years, using a fictional Facebook account to deceive thousands of conservatives as part of an elaborate “performance art” project, The Daily Caller has learned.

In an attempt to trick national news outlets, Lacey Bassett, masquerading as tea party activist Anna Jones, claimed last week that her Facebook page had been hacked and vandalized. TheDC’s investigation, however, indicates that Bassett organized the vandalism herself. [UPDATE: 90 minutes after this story was published, Anna Jones’ page vanished from Facebook.]

Bassett teaches web design at Provo College and works as a graduate-level instructor at the University of Utah. Her effort to blend in with conservatives apparently began in April 2010, when she tweeted about “infiltrating [a] Tea Parting gathering.” Two months later, she used her own email address to register the domain name “Liber-Tea.com.”

The domain is protected by a “proxy” service that hides the identity of its registrant, but TheDC was able to identify Bassett as the owner by searching archival records created before she enrolled with her proxy provider.

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