Recognized by internet users all over the world, the Twitter page was founded by Rob Manuel, a marketing specialist who’s also spent the last couple of decades building interactive web projects, such as the b3ta.com message board. The Mirror revealed that Rob started it all with an open invitation from his personal account, encouraging people to anonymously confess their sins via an online form. Upon receiving the first hundred of them, Manuel laid them out on the newly-created ‘Fesshole’ account.
In a recent interview with Bored Panda, Rob remembered the very beginning of the project: “I was bored one afternoon and I thought it would be fun to open a google form and ask people to confess stuff anonymously. I figured at best maybe 500 people would care. Now there's nearly a million followers,” he said, jokingly adding “Please make them go away.”
Indeed, Rob’s account has already reached nearly 990k followers, who have revealed secrets ranging from shocking to odd, and everything in between. He told Bored Panda what was one of the most bizarre confessions he’s ever received. The anonymous person wrote: “About a year ago, the company I worked for switched to a four-day week. Never told my wife. Each Friday, I hire out a small office where I play Football Manager. I like to pretend it's my Manager's office. I have 'conversations' with players about disciplinary matters and contracts.”
“I quite fancy living my life like this, although I actually hate football,” the founder of ‘Fesshole’ recounted the anonymous story.
In an interview with the Mirror last year, Manuel revealed what early confession became a hit, receiving 36,000 likes on the page: "My husband's dying wish was to make people think he led a double life,” an anonymous person submitted via an online form. “We had three blacked-out Landrovers follow the corsage and had actors in suits and trench coats as the funeral conductors. He was a bank manager for TSB. To this day, we haven't told anyone the truth."
Rob Manuel pointed out that observational comedy is the core of it all. “Observational comedy with the added richness of going, 'is this is real?' And we're sort of recognizing we are to some degree, imperfect," he told the Mirror.
Over the years, Rob’s observational comedy transcended Twitter and was presented to the general public in a book, titled The Very Best of Fesshole: Britain Confesses Anonymously, comprising “Fesshole’s” greatest confessions to date. The founder of the Twitter account and the author of the book was also able to go on tours, presenting some of the submissions in front of a live audience.
“I enjoy doing the live shows the most—seeing different parts of the UK and meeting people,” he told Bored Panda. Rob added that doing audience confessions tends to get pretty funny. “We've had police people talking about letting people off crimes,” he said, providing an example. “There was also a guy who was running a WhatsApp group with 200 members for exchanging fart recordings, who turned up and told us all.”
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School and author of 'The Secret Life of Secrets', Michael Slepian, explained to Bored Panda how getting things off of your chest can benefit a person: “When we keep a secret entirely to ourselves, we leave only one venue to work through a problem: our own mind. But when we choose to be alone with something, we often don't develop the healthiest ways of thinking about it. Other people's reactions often temper overly negative thinking, and help us out of unhelpful thinking loops.”
“When someone reveals a secret to a person they are keeping it from, I call this confession,” Prof. Slepian pointed out. “When we reveal a secret to a third party, I call this confiding. Confession is sometimes the right thing to do, but not always. But confiding is the best of both worlds: you get to reveal a secret to someone while still keeping it secret from others.
“What is helpful about confiding is that the person often responds in a useful way, offering emotional support or practical advice. Confiding in someone anonymously can be helpful too, but only to the extent the person offers a helpful response,” he added.
Even though this isn’t as relevant when it comes to social media accounts, such as ‘Fesshole’, sharing a secret can create a stronger bond between people, which is especially prominent among kids. “Both children and adults use secrecy as a way out of getting in trouble, but if you ask a child what a secret is, they'll say a secret is something that you only tell your best friend,” Michael Slepian suggested.
“Young children think about secrets as something to be shared, and too often adults lose sight of this. Sharing a secret with someone, something you wouldn't tell just anyone, is one of the most powerful social forces we have control over. Our confidants recognize revealing a secret as an act of intimacy.”