This was a very interesting read that left me with very mixed feelings. The privacy advocate part of me was left feeling a little slimy by this article. Maybe these are people that simply didn't...
Exemplary
This was a very interesting read that left me with very mixed feelings.
The privacy advocate part of me was left feeling a little slimy by this article. Maybe these are people that simply didn't want to have high public profiles? The lack of evidence related to their names might just be because they chose pseudonyms?
I could see some of myself in that article. I'm pretty protective of my online privacy. I didn't used to be, but then I got burned and learned my lesson. I'm a pseudonym on this site, and I make it a point to not give out too many identifying details about myself. When I do, I try to make the identifying details I give "fuzzy" and imprecise. I don't have a Twitter handle nor an Instagram account. There are (hopefully) no photos of me floating around the internet attached to this account. Every meaningful interaction I've had through this name has been via text alone. I'm the sort of potential non-person that the article is examining.
There was one part that particularly bothered me:
Similar to Banks and Hamid, there are no pictures of Craven and Vaughan together. Instead, Craven posted on X/Twitter screenshots of alleged text conversations between the two. Each post provides a glimpse into their alleged relationship, but without showcasing any physical interactions.
For some reason, the implication that a person might not exist doesn't hit me as hard as the implication that a relationship might not exist. I think it's because the author comes across as sort of entitled to proof of their relationship which feels even more invasive to me?
Like, I talk about my husband all the time here, but as far as anyone knows I could be completely making him up! Y'all have no evidence he exists because I simply do not provide it, and I would feel deeply uncomfortable if someone messaged me here and said "hey, we think your husband is fake -- prove to me that he's actually real and you're actually together." I'm already extremely unlikely to post a photo of myself, but I'm 1000x less likely to post one of the both of us.
Now, with all of that said, I can see the other side too.
There's a tension between attention and privacy. I do wonder if, when a person has a large enough cultural impact or community presence, that they sort of fundamentally forego some of their privacy. If a person is acting honestly, this isn't too troublesome of an exchange, because a lot of it is still dictated by that individual and what they're willing to do/share.
If a person is acting dishonestly though, it's a breach of trust. The appeals to privacy aren't coming from an individual's comfort levels but are a smokescreen to maintain a fraudulent ruse. There's immense potential for harm there.
The article doesn't really lay out a lot of harm committed by these individuals. It sounds like most of them, real or not, were doing good or otherwise neutral things. When was the last time we read about an X/Twitter saga and it wasn't about hate speech or online abuse, for example? These people, real or not, seemed like decent human beings, and I think that should count for something -- especially given what we know of the larger backdrop of the psedonymous internet.
It doesn't mean there isn't harm though -- if they aren't real, then there genuinely has been a breach of trust. If they are real, then there has genuinely been a breach of privacy. I don't entirely know how to weigh those. It's easy for me to say I think the potential privacy breach is worse because I'm someone who's very protective of that, but I think if I were involved in these communities I'd have a different feeling. I imagine what it would be like to learn that one of our prominent and beloved posters here was actually just someone's alt account, and I would genuinely feel a little betrayed by that.
But, to keep my waffling going, I also don't think it would be that bad? For me, a big part of the internet is being able to try out different identities and personas. I've had innumerable different handles over the years, and many of them have "fit" different aspects of myself or even helped me develop those aspects. None of these have gone so far as to be an outright lie about my identity -- I've never catfished anybody or pretended to be someone I'm not (save for being in the closet, lol) -- but if you compared who kfwyre is to any of my former reddit handles, you'd find a lot of differences. I think the idea that the internet gives us some flexibility in our identity expression is a good thing, to the point that someone "playing" different roles within an online community doesn't feel like too big of a breach to me.
I don't think it's super okay, but I don't think it's the worst thing either. I, honestly, can see why someone might do that.
Somewhat coincidentally, I'm currently watching a show called I Love That for You. It's about a woman who lived through pediatric cancer as a child. As an adult, she gets her dream job, but then makes a mistake and gets fired from it almost immediately. Extremely stressed by the firing and the prospect of losing her career, she lies about having cancer as a way of getting sympathy. As a consequence, she keeps her job.
It's a mostly light comedy (Vanessa Bayer is amazing in it), but it's surprisingly relevant to this piece. After lying about having cancer, the woman sees her career take off. She starts to be celebrated for her strength and people buy in to her cancer survivor persona. The lie is effective for her, getting her praise, attention, and career advancement. All the while though, she has the moral struggle of knowing that she's deceiving people and not knowing how to stop it without jeopardizing everything and betraying people's trust. It reminds me thematically of Dear Evan Hansen -- another "good person tells a lie that gets too big" story.
I haven't finished the show yet, so I don't know where it lands on this issue. It's also entirely possible I'm biasing myself by associating it to this situation because we're meant to be sympathetic to the liar, but I bring it up because I couldn't not think about it as I read this piece. If the people in the article really don't exist, then it seems like there's someone with a mostly good heart whose lies have gotten out of hand. Yes, that feels like a softening of a morally bad, and fundamentally duplicitous act, but I also can't help but think how much worse an article like this would read if the person doing the lying were genuinely committed to being evil instead of good (or at the very least, decent).
This was a very interesting read that left me with very mixed feelings.
The privacy advocate part of me was left feeling a little slimy by this article. Maybe these are people that simply didn't want to have high public profiles? The lack of evidence related to their names might just be because they chose pseudonyms?
I could see some of myself in that article. I'm pretty protective of my online privacy. I didn't used to be, but then I got burned and learned my lesson. I'm a pseudonym on this site, and I make it a point to not give out too many identifying details about myself. When I do, I try to make the identifying details I give "fuzzy" and imprecise. I don't have a Twitter handle nor an Instagram account. There are (hopefully) no photos of me floating around the internet attached to this account. Every meaningful interaction I've had through this name has been via text alone. I'm the sort of potential non-person that the article is examining.
There was one part that particularly bothered me:
For some reason, the implication that a person might not exist doesn't hit me as hard as the implication that a relationship might not exist. I think it's because the author comes across as sort of entitled to proof of their relationship which feels even more invasive to me?
Like, I talk about my husband all the time here, but as far as anyone knows I could be completely making him up! Y'all have no evidence he exists because I simply do not provide it, and I would feel deeply uncomfortable if someone messaged me here and said "hey, we think your husband is fake -- prove to me that he's actually real and you're actually together." I'm already extremely unlikely to post a photo of myself, but I'm 1000x less likely to post one of the both of us.
(An aside: our standards for photographic proof are pretty much moot at this point anyway.)
Now, with all of that said, I can see the other side too.
There's a tension between attention and privacy. I do wonder if, when a person has a large enough cultural impact or community presence, that they sort of fundamentally forego some of their privacy. If a person is acting honestly, this isn't too troublesome of an exchange, because a lot of it is still dictated by that individual and what they're willing to do/share.
If a person is acting dishonestly though, it's a breach of trust. The appeals to privacy aren't coming from an individual's comfort levels but are a smokescreen to maintain a fraudulent ruse. There's immense potential for harm there.
The article doesn't really lay out a lot of harm committed by these individuals. It sounds like most of them, real or not, were doing good or otherwise neutral things. When was the last time we read about an X/Twitter saga and it wasn't about hate speech or online abuse, for example? These people, real or not, seemed like decent human beings, and I think that should count for something -- especially given what we know of the larger backdrop of the psedonymous internet.
It doesn't mean there isn't harm though -- if they aren't real, then there genuinely has been a breach of trust. If they are real, then there has genuinely been a breach of privacy. I don't entirely know how to weigh those. It's easy for me to say I think the potential privacy breach is worse because I'm someone who's very protective of that, but I think if I were involved in these communities I'd have a different feeling. I imagine what it would be like to learn that one of our prominent and beloved posters here was actually just someone's alt account, and I would genuinely feel a little betrayed by that.
But, to keep my waffling going, I also don't think it would be that bad? For me, a big part of the internet is being able to try out different identities and personas. I've had innumerable different handles over the years, and many of them have "fit" different aspects of myself or even helped me develop those aspects. None of these have gone so far as to be an outright lie about my identity -- I've never catfished anybody or pretended to be someone I'm not (save for being in the closet, lol) -- but if you compared who kfwyre is to any of my former reddit handles, you'd find a lot of differences. I think the idea that the internet gives us some flexibility in our identity expression is a good thing, to the point that someone "playing" different roles within an online community doesn't feel like too big of a breach to me.
I don't think it's super okay, but I don't think it's the worst thing either. I, honestly, can see why someone might do that.
Somewhat coincidentally, I'm currently watching a show called I Love That for You. It's about a woman who lived through pediatric cancer as a child. As an adult, she gets her dream job, but then makes a mistake and gets fired from it almost immediately. Extremely stressed by the firing and the prospect of losing her career, she lies about having cancer as a way of getting sympathy. As a consequence, she keeps her job.
It's a mostly light comedy (Vanessa Bayer is amazing in it), but it's surprisingly relevant to this piece. After lying about having cancer, the woman sees her career take off. She starts to be celebrated for her strength and people buy in to her cancer survivor persona. The lie is effective for her, getting her praise, attention, and career advancement. All the while though, she has the moral struggle of knowing that she's deceiving people and not knowing how to stop it without jeopardizing everything and betraying people's trust. It reminds me thematically of Dear Evan Hansen -- another "good person tells a lie that gets too big" story.
I haven't finished the show yet, so I don't know where it lands on this issue. It's also entirely possible I'm biasing myself by associating it to this situation because we're meant to be sympathetic to the liar, but I bring it up because I couldn't not think about it as I read this piece. If the people in the article really don't exist, then it seems like there's someone with a mostly good heart whose lies have gotten out of hand. Yes, that feels like a softening of a morally bad, and fundamentally duplicitous act, but I also can't help but think how much worse an article like this would read if the person doing the lying were genuinely committed to being evil instead of good (or at the very least, decent).