Faking it online
pease
Tech Admin
in Epiphanies
I've long been intrigued about people joining online forums using fake personas. Not as a means to an end (eg catfishing or creating a false identity), but for the primary purpose of engaging in public discussion, interacting with other members, while adopting an inauthentic role.
Given the formative effect that people using fake personas has had on these forums, my question isn't primarily about why individuals would do this, but the effect that this has on online communities and the ways in which online communities can and do respond.
Given the formative effect that people using fake personas has had on these forums, my question isn't primarily about why individuals would do this, but the effect that this has on online communities and the ways in which online communities can and do respond.
Comments
For instance, many many moons ago when I was about 18 I was bothered by the way gender and gender preception affected one's online interactions.* So I joined a roleplaying forum but I claimed that the person behind my character (Gwaihir, named after the eagle) was a young man. I wasn't perfect at it and at least one person says he saw through me.
That community ended up being home for many years. They are the ones who nicknamed me Gwai. I ended up being open with them as they learned enough of my real life to need to know. I have met many of them. At least a couple I am still in some touch with. So I don't think that my attempt to be who I wasn't hurt anyone. But obviously if things had gone differently and they felt deceived that could have been a heavier harder thing.
*And my own gender feelings, but that wasn't something I was aware of then
Yes, there is a risk that someone can flat out lie and misrepresent themselves. That’s a risk weighed against other risks in an online forum. And my experience is that in the relatively rare times it happens, people can often tell that something is off.
IMHO that's not the kind of thing you're likely to see a great deal of, but it can do damage to a community, and more the longer it goes undetected.
What effect do you think it has?
I do. An unconscionable catfisher who hurt a lot of genuine people who were invested in their narrative. Just despicable.
On the note of the OP I post regularly on the INTJ Reddit forum and despite my little ♀️ next to my profile name, I am regularly replied to as "dude" . Must have something to do with my posting style which I have been told is somewhat eccentric, but I guess it's eccentric only if you know I'm a woman. Apparently it's perfectly normal for a man.
I generally don't bother to correct the misperception. Not my fault if you can't read emoji.
AFF
This definitely had an effect on me - the Curious Buddhist / unicycle collective involved a few other sock puppets to interact with the main identities and it does make me think twice about posters I don't know who could fit that mould.
Sometimes it turns out over time that yes I see enough to feel they're who they say they are - sometimes I've felt ultra cautious and have hung back from interacting more than necessary with posters who ring those particular bells for me. It's always at the back of my mind though when those bells ring - but then I tend towards caution and social anxiety as a person so that may be just me. I think I probably privately err on the less trusting side but also try to keep an open mind about things as well, as I could be totally wrong and just sensitised by this and other bad experiences...
Per Lambchopped that experience has made me more cautious and probably a bit more suspicious in certain circumstances. I have come across this in real life at one remove in that a colleague that I worked with - a few years before I joined the team - had convinced all his colleagues that his wife was dying of cancer and they found out by accident when trying to send flowers to the hospital that the illness was entirely fictional.
My experience of working alongside of him, was that it was as if he just found life too boring - if there was no real crisis or drama he would tend to narrate events as if there was one. I did wonder if he had histrionic personality disorder.
Echoing this, please pease.
I think it has a chilling effect on community. I see it as a violation of the Eighth Commandment (Scriptural, not Shiptural) about not bearing false witness. Ultimately, fraud is destructive of community, because nobody can believe what anybody says or represents. It burns through the compassion and goodwill that people extend to others in distress.
There are milder versions of misrepresentation, even prudent ones, as Gwai noted: women pretending to be men online, to avoid harassment. In that case, the underlying community problem is men harassing women.
When it involves adoption of the voice of a person in a marginalized group, it's an offense to that group. That person is "taking up space" in a public forum that is not theirs to take, and prevents a real voice from being heard.
It's a problem IRL in some places in Canadian society, with the phenomenon of "Pretendians"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretendian
People who are not indigenous, adopting the persona and voice of indigenous people, are truly problematic. AIUI Canadian identity concerning indigeneity does not centre on blood quantum (eww) but on which First Nation acknowledges your identity. Americans may be more familiar with this phenomenon in terms of those who pretend to be Black online.
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One is the anonymity, typically in the name of protecting privacy, represented by using a “screen name” rather than one’s actual name.
The other is intentional misrepresentation of being what one is not, such as with regard to gender, ethnicity, occupation, religion or whatever, which can be done regardless of whether a screen name is used rather than a real name. (Though a screen name certainly can make detection more difficult.)
I was going to say something along those lines as well. Most of us here post under a screen name - I think back when I joined the Ship in 2007 I did it mostly because that’s pretty much what everyone else was doing, but now I think it’s pretty essential to many of us not to have every thought we’ve ever expressed on the Ship instantly Googleable under our real names. That said, I always post under the assumption that anyone could be reading what I post here and that for one reason or another they might know or figure out who I am IRL.
I’ve occasionally wondered if a particular Shipmate was really who or what they held themselves out to be in some way, but the impression I get is that people here are generally genuinely sharing their opinions, experiences, etc., bearing in mind that we are all inevitably selective about what we share in particular contexts and especially online.
Truthfully, these scenarios are exactly why I censor more than half of what happens to my family in real life. Don't want to be accused. Nobody ever has, but if I were looking at me, I'd wonder.
It's one thing to actively misrepresent yourself, making positive statements that are outright lies. And it's particularly bad when you are in a space where people are expected to be a particular gender/race/group/whatsit, or just to be telling the truth.
But there are spaces where a certain amount of pretending is permitted. The Ship was one, in the early days. We had folks who would come on as a particular gender (that was mostly the issue) and then, after they felt safe enough, would sort of sheepishly admit they'd been pretending (and I'm not talking about people working through gender identity issues here). I remember this happening several times, and the usual reaction was, "Oh. Whatever." Because we all knew that in the culture of those days, it was fine to represent yourself as being of a different gender or whatever, and so I, at least, never assumed that the curated identity was identical with the real life person behind it. Sort of like going to a costume party, where you expect people to turn up in disguise, if they want to. It's not a lie or harmful when it's an understood alternative.
And really, ALL online identities are to some extent fictitious, because we can't cram in every aspect of our lives, even important ones--and lots of us don't even know ourselves well enough to try. (I've had my son mimicking me occasionally, and it's a small shock every time to realize what he's picked up on as a defining point of Mom. I had no idea I said "basically" so often, or that I was such an obvious worrywart
My personal feeling is that a degree of suspicion and distrust in relation to anything online is appropriate, and that online community (especially one operating in a public space) isn't directly equivalent to offline community in this regard.
There appear to be a range of positions on the nature of "fake" (for want of a word) personas, and the potential harms.
I like Lamb Chopped's simile of going to a costume party, of being in disguise, and broadly agree that all online identities are to some extent fictitious. In that regard, I lean towards "fake" being a fairly broad term, without a clearly-defined or commonly-agreed boundary. So, rather than anonymity and misrepresentation being two different things, I suggest that anonymity (or pseudonymity) is just at the end of the scale that most of us are are comfortable with and consider not to be intrinsically harmful.
I think it's also relevant (eg in relation to boundaries) that this particular community has a broadly Christian framing, even if a significant proportion of the members don't (or no longer) subscribe to its tenets.
This suggests to me that there might be a widely-held expectation of being open and welcoming to newcomers, and that there is a consequent expectation that people will be more-or-less who they say they are, and that to be otherwise is to abuse the welcome.
But, as has been pointed out by members over the years, its also the case that some people join and engage because they can explore issues here, especially relating to Christian faith, that they would not do (and not be able to do) in their real-life situations.
Thinking about Gwai's post, maybe intent only matters if you're found out, and that regardless of the nature of the misrepresentation, the individual is then at the mercy of the community. In other words, maybe a community decides for itself whether or not a particular individual's misrepresentation is harmful, rather than it being intrinsically harmful.
I remember on one site, I decided I wouldn't share my age or gender, and I was quite open with this decision. Quite a few people got annoyed with this, saying I wasn't being real, that they couldn't get to know me properly. I told them they could get to know me just fine by what I wrote, and that age and gender don't define me. I found it interesting when people took what I wrote and put it through some gender identifier thing and told me I was clearly a man!
I remember on that same site one lad admitting that he'd lied about his age so that he could be accepted into the site and be made a moderator and be respected. He'd been 12 when he joined - he waited till he was 18, to admit his lie! It didn't bother me, but one friend he'd made (who'd thought she was the same age as him) was very hurt and felt he'd not been real with her and that she now couldn't trust him.
A time when I observed a community get hurt was on a diary site where one diary was supposedly of a dying boy - 'a dying boy' was literally his username, and I think he claimed to be 13 - and a lot of people felt sorry for him and sent him gifts and money. I'd suspected it wasn't genuine when I first saw it, but it also didn't interest or entertain me, and so I didn't follow his diary - I just imagined some kid was having fun creating a melodramatic story. I then felt bad for not saying anything when I realised afterwards that people had been taken in, had sent him gifts and money, and were now feeling betrayed, but of course in that situation it's pretty hard to voice suspicion without sounding heartless, especially when it is just suspicion, plus none of my friends on the site followed him anyway.
Apparently one parent had been unmasked as a faker before I joined (some of the parents were super smart and well connected in the community, and worked together to work out what was going on.
After I joined (maybe 3 years or so in), another faker joined the community. They were identified when their child died and families wanted to send flowers etc. to the family. I think one of the admins got in touch with their treatment centre and found out that they didn't exist. The thing that families found particularly hurtful was the co-opting of other families' experiences and the complications of treatment the faker claimed their child was experiencing. It was a very distressing time for all concerned, particularly those families who recognised themselves in the posts that were being created by the faker, which mirrored those of their own children who were really struggling. The hard thing to understand was the motivation of someone to seek out the community and what they might be hoping to gain from joining it. Honestly, it's the club no one wants to belong to!
Joining the listserv was tightened up and behind the scenes I am sure there were checks being carried out by the admins, you could not begin posting without the approval of the admins.
The great strength of the community was the number of members (over 500) and the willingness of families to share their stories, their experiences and their encouragment with others, particularly the newly diagnosed shell-shocked families who had a lot of questions and thrived on the information supplied. Even though I joined 3 years into treatment, I still learnt so much and remain grateful for the care of that community.
Our son has a blog site and even now, a lady called S from the community will comment on my infrequent posts, even though both our kids are now 15 years into their survivorship. There are fortunately more good than bad actors out there, in my experience!
There was a quote from Philip Hope-Wallace, the music and drama critic, that has worked for me. Someone once moaned to him, "Where will I find sympathy?" to which he briskly replied, "Look in the dictionary - it's between shit and syphilis".
In contrast, in groups that were set up to promote discussion, why do people start supporting each other? What do long-time members of these forums remember about how that happened here?
Is there a difference between people who construct a fake persona in order to engender support, and those who are looking for engagement?
The silly one was in university, where, in many of the lecture rooms, students (presumably just us immature first-years) had continued the high-school habit of scribbling on desks. Desktops were covered with people's names, declarations of undying love of the "JB + CH" variety, and the occasional pithy saying.
One day, while not too engaged during a lecture, I wrote the name "Terry O'Leary" on the desk. It wasn't my name or the real name of anyone I knew; I just liked the rhyming sound of it (as a writer, then and now, I'm always thinking of character names, but I had no specific plan for the imaginary Terry O'Leary apart from writing his name on a desk in the Calculus classroom). Until ... someone wrote "Hi Terry!" under it. And I replied.
Over a few weeks of classes the desk-scribbles evolved into a conversation between Imaginary Terry and this girl who assumed she was flirting by desktop with a guy who sat in the same desk for a different class. I'm a woman, btw, and have never experienced any gender dysphoria or even curiosity or desire to be a man -- I was role-playing Terry like a character I might write in a novel, making up a description (hot, of course) when she asked what he looked like, etc. Finally she tried to arrange a meet-up at one of the cafes and the game was up. I confessed I was a girl, Terry wasn't a real person, and I'd just been having fun. Pretty sure she was angry but as we never met, I never knew for sure.
The anonymity, the ability to create a new persona and play it like a role on stage, but have people react as if to a real person, felt both fun and, when I had to admit to it, kind of icky, as I realized this girl was (improbably) developing a crush on an imaginary guy through doodling on a desk, and wanted to carry it into a face-to-face meeting. It both helped me understand, and made me eager to avoid, the whole idea of creating a fully fake persona once the online world emerged some years later.
The other (not-silly) experience was, like the one @Cheery Gardener described, a cancer faker. It was a teenager at the boarding school where I taught in my 20s, who came with a complete sob story -- her parents had kicked her out of the house AND she had cancer, and this Christian school was her only hope. She had a very complete story including faked doctors' notes, and even the school nurse was taken in, but I also think we weren't inclined to be suspicious. She would disappear for days at a time, which normally would have been a huge discipline issue but in her case was put down to hospitalizations (and, of course, the story about her cruel parents kicking her out prevented anyone calling the family to confirm any of this). It went on for several months and I believe the cracks finally started to appear when some of her fellow students (who were extremely supportive) dropped into the hospital in hopes of making a surprise visit during one of her alleged hospital stays. It was a very, very weird experience within that real-life community that left a lot of people feeling badly cheated and betrayed. But it was no surprise to me that people would do the same thing in search of attention, support, maybe even money, in online forums where it would be so much easier to get away with it.
I was going to say I was the only one deceived. I was the only one caught up in that persona, but he was carrying out other deceptions, including on his wife and someone I knew as a friend was also caught up in them.
And yes, financial gain is a possibility.
Perhaps some will be trying to do something with the anger they are feeling with the disease and/or the treatment? The 'Why me?" effect, perhaps.
I suspect the person involved may have been isolated or friendless and was attracted to the supportive community that existed. I think that once integrated into the community, it was harder to disengage as time went on. It was disturbing though and from the other side of things, very difficult to understand or to have empathy for someone who would engage in that way.
A kid at our son's secondary school also claimed to have been diagnosed, but the school got onto that and shut it down very quickly. I did feel sorry for the teenager involved, they had no real concept of what they were claiming and it was a ploy for attention. Our son was pretty upset by it for a few days, but he could see how sad it was to feel you needed to do that.
@chrisstiles I'd not heard of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and even though it's the opposite of what I have described, the result is fairly similar, a questioning of how well you really know a person and a desire or need to try to understand why someone would be untruthful about their circumstances. Are both driven by a sense of being in a fantasy? I think it's almost impossible to know what happens inside people's heads and what drives their actions.
As a tangent I've not watched the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar, but I think at some point I will do so. It might not be available for all to see, but you can get the gist from the well known online encyclopedia.
I’ve been musing about what to make of LC’s description of people pretending to be a different gender in the early days of the Ship. It occurs to me that there are at least a few Shipmates whose posts I read regularly and whose gender I don’t know… and it doesn’t really seem relevant one way or the other. I think it starts to get more relevant if it turned out that people were claiming to speak from some personal experience that they didn’t actually have.
One of the most interesting questions is why she did it. While she did make money out of it, I don't think that was her primary motivation. It was much more about the attention. While in jail she apparently has been diagnosed with factitious disorder (what used to be called Munchausen's).
And societies like ours don't do a particularly good job of ensuring that all members of society are bought up in nurturing environments where the sort of sociocultural norms that most people here take for granted are demonstrated and learned.
Alongside these, you could add curiosity and an inclination to see anything that happens on a screen as a game, which I'd argue we saw in relation to Church of Fools, particularly from younger engagers.
The pathologisation of behaviour that doesn't make sense to us is a slippery slope, as is the normalisation of behaviour that does make sense to us. Even more so in a communal context.
Yes, although it's a bit more comprehensible in one circumstance than the other - I'd been aware of the story for some time, but still found the film worth watching as it teases out all these issues.
A very well-known (British) forum that I’ve posted on for getting on for 20 years took the cake with a long-term poster (decade plus), who decided to document his personal terminal cancer journey, for nearly 18 months (in his own thread).
He eventually unmasked himself as it having been a wind up. That was about five years ago now, and he’s still posting on the site. There again it is a fairly ‘no holds barred’ place.
Some temporary restriction of privileges, absolute abuse from getting on for a hundred people, but no banning.