Imposters

In Chapter 4 of danah boyd’s “It’s Complicated,” she talks to teens about their parents’ rising concern of internet safety. Although the chapter opened by talking about two boy’s parent’s influence on their use (or lack thereof) of MySpace and Facebook, the chapter especially focused on the safety and privacy of adolescent girls. The girls expressed concerns of rape, assault, and kidnapping as possibilities of unsafe social media interaction. Boyd offered some insight, saying “[the girls’] fears were rooted not in personal experience but in media cover- age magnified by parental concerns.” With shows such as Datline NBC’s To Catch a Predator and MTV’s Catfish, the internet has come to be known as a dangerous place for adolescents, teens, and even young adults alike.

That being said, this chapter reminded me largely of my own personal concerns of internet safety—namely, privacy. That brings me to the concept of “catfishing.” Catfishing is defined as via Urban Dictionary “someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.” I was reminded of this conversation I had with a good friend of mine back in 2011, and decided to unearth that conversation from my inbox.

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 11.49.37 AM

The conversation above shows that two of my friends had catfishes of themselves on Facebook. This may have been an indirect result of their increase in followers on MySpace, then Tumblr, in the years leading up to 2011. I remember once this happened, we literally all panicked. I don’t think I’ve ever reported someone as quickly as I did when I found out two of my good friends had imposters on the Internet. The damage was minimal, but the aftereffect was scarring. This prompted my friends Tho and Miranda to change their privacy settings to the strictest settings. A few years later, this also happened to my friend Cynthia, once she started gaining a large following on Tumblr as well.

Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 11.57.48 AM

In fact, this even happened to me, when someone took my photos from my Tumblr account this past summer, and began to use my face on Grindr, a gay dating/chat app (and I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with my girlfriend for almost two years, so it makes absolutely no sense.)

I guess what I’m trying to point to is that the internet, because of the element of anonymity and the allowance to curate content in whatever shape or form we feel, raises the concern of privacy in more ways than one. In terms of catfishing, said privacy is violated with the burden of one’s identity—or rather, fake identity. Filters—though on Instagram photos are nice—can be used for evil (sorry, a little dramatic) when applied to the concept of filtering content to present an image of oneself… or in this case, someone else as yourself.

The scariest part is, all these catfish accounts of my friends and I still exist today.

3 thoughts on “Imposters

  1. natalypalma

    Wow, that’s really crazy! I’ve heard this happening to people who have a big following on twitter, instagram, youtube, tumblr, etc – but that fact that this happened to you is disturbing! I guess with having such a heavy online presence (as well all do with having so many social media accounts) you never really know who is looking at your account! This is a a form of identity theft! And while it isn’t so severe as (I hope) they don’t have more in-depth information..it is still good to be cautious 🙂

  2. Victoria Edsell

    This is such a trippy concept. I have had many friends where this same sort of things has happened. My friends however took it as a sign of attractiveness and popularity. I just flat out think it is creepy. This kinda of makes me think about my personal presence online, like where is my online record, does that exist? And who is looking me up? The Internet has given the world infinite connectivity but at the same it feels as though our worlds have just become that much smaller.

  3. ShannonMartine

    This is pretty horrifying when you really examine how troubled some one must be to take on another persons identity as their own. It really speaks volumes of how easy it is to create profiles and how little authentication is required.

Leave a Reply