You may have heard about or read the very popular blog “Gay Girl in Damascus” which is hosted here on Blogger. Written by Amina, a Syrian-American gay woman now living in Damascus, the blog has for the last four months chronicled the life and thoughts of a woman facing the challenges of being gay in a Muslim world, and also being caught up in the Arab protest movement there. The blog has over 2000 followers, and NPR, the Guardian and other legit news sources have all covered her story. The Guardian’s coverage on May 6 began with the headline “A Gay Girl in Damascus becomes a heroine of the Syrian Revolt”. Recently her many readers were dismayed to learn (in a post by her cousin) that Amina had been arrested by the Syrian authorities, her whereabouts and safety unknown. The blogosphere lit up with concerned followers searching for news, and launching a “Free Amina” online protest movement.
But hold on. Last weekend an apology was posted on the blog that revealed that the blog was all an elaborate deception and that Amina was in fact the pseudonym of a man named Tom MacMaster. Decidedly not a gay girl in Damascus, MacMaster is a 40-year old male American grad student from Georgia. He’s straight, married and now resides in Scotland.
More than a few (me included) were immediately reminded of the classic New Yorker cartoon of a dog in front of a PC, saying “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
MacMaster may not have started out with the intention of creating so large and elaborate a hoax. He created his on-line identity, he says, as a way of being able to write anonymously about the Middle Eastern protest movement and Palestinian issues, which he says he cares deeply about. Part of his apologia this week (he’s now been interviewed multiple times) is that the character was fictional but the issues he wrote about were not.
I think his readers will have a lot to say about that. The shock and anger has been considerable, and MacMaster says he is surprised by some of the venom now coming his way. Apparently his online identity was more than just a political front too, since he also carried on electronic and Facebook relationships in the guise of Amina, including what seems to be a romantic relationship with a lesbian woman in Canada. Not surprisingly, she and others who ‘knew’ him online have not had much to say that was nice about MacMaster. Many are commenting on the destruction of trust and the betrayal of what they thought was real but now find to be fake.
I think fiction is one thing, as long as you know it’s fiction. When you don’t know, then it’s nothing but falsehood and deception. Creating an elaborate on-line identity – complete with phony photos said to have been taken recently in Syria, but now revealed to have been taken on a trip there years before – is quite another thing. I have written before in this blog about how anonymity is harming honest dialog online, and how the need for a verifiable identity standard has never been greater.
“Trust but verify,” Ronald Reagan said. It’s a lesson we seem doomed to learn over and over. And by the way, one of the online sources that was quickest to criticize MacMaster’s hoax was the web site Lez Get Real, blasting him for making a mockery of lesbian politics. On Monday, the editor of the site, the deaf lesbian woman named Paula Brooks, was revealed to be a man named Bill Graber, a straight guy living in Ohio. No, I am not making this up!
(The Gay Girl blog is here, complete with the older posts and this week’s apology from MacMaster. The hoax was reported in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many other sources.)
4 comments:
It's hard enough leading just this ONE life, let alone TWO!
Trust, but verify?? Impossible to do as this latest hoax makes it clear. If NPR and the Guardian were duped, how is the average person supposed to figure out what is true.
An amazing story and subsequent chain of events. The internet has made us feel closer to each other and yet there is no way of knowing who that other person across the electronic gateway really is.
This seems to fit right in with other imposters and impersonators! There's a book on the new books shelves at the library titled "The Man in the Rockefeller Suit" about a German immigrant who got away with posing as a Rockefeller for years... even Ben Franklin wrote an advice column in the guise of a housewife (Mrs. Silence Dogood).
Hoaxers and imposters are nothing new. What is new is the reach someone has now courtesy of the Internet. The potential audience for a scam, fraud, or innocent prank is no longer just local; it is global.
So, more than ever, caveat lector - though just how one can verify remains to be seen (Facebook is not a place to verify anything, either!). (I'm not sure requiring a digital ID is the answer.. the American in me rebels at the thought!)
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