The Weird Reasons Why People Make Up False Identities on the Internet

By Charles Seife
July 29, 2014

Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier than ever before.

We can’t physically meet most of the people we interact with on the internet. So we create avatars who represent us in the online world, personae that are designed—on some level, conscious or subconscious—to shape others’ ideas about who we really are.

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Take Amina Arraf. She was a 35-year-old Syrian American who had become a prominent blogger. Her blog, Gay Girl in Damascus, described life in Syria during the beginning of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad.

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But in the early evening of Monday, June 6, 2011, she was walking to meet a friend in downtown Damascus when three young men wrestled her into a red minivan, which screeched off into the dusk. Arraf’s cousin posted details to Amina’s blog. The outcry was immediate. The Guardian reported the kidnapping, and so did the New York Times, Fox News, Gawker, CNN, and several other news organizations. The International Business Times asked how the United States should respond to the abduction, and “Free Amina” websites and posters began to spring up.

Within a few hours, though, Andy Carvin, an NPR journalist, noted on Twitter that none of the people who had ever interviewed Arraf had met her or even spoken to her over the phone. Once someone began to question Arraf’s identity, the illusion shattered. By the morning of June 8, the Wall Street Journal had discovered that photos purportedly of Arraf were, in fact, snapshots of a woman living in London. Shortly thereafter, a website in communication with Arraf was able to show that her computer was in Scotland. Soon it became clear that Arraf wasn’t a “she” at all. She was the creation of Tom MacMaster, a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh.

Everything about Arraf was completely made up—MacMaster had created Arraf’s Facebook page, her Twitter account, her email address—and had conducted interviews with numerous journalists in her name. Why? It was a matter of authority. MacMaster had some very strong views on Middle Eastern affairs, so he created Amina Arraf to give his ideas credibility.

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Debbie Swenson was after attention when she created a Type 1 sockpuppet, a fictitious teenage girl named Kaycee Nicole, in 1999. In a blog she called Living Colours, Kaycee described in detail the ups and downs of her battle with leukemia, which attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy.

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the truth was that Kaycee simply didn’t exist. Debbie Swenson admitted the next day that Kaycee had been a fabrication.

Stories like Kaycee’s are surprisingly common, to the point that psychiatrists and psychologists have started noticing a pattern—a syndrome that’s now called “virtual factitious disorder” or, more snappily, “Munchausen by internet.” In the syndrome someone creates an online persona who suffers some kind of tragedy and milks the resulting outpouring of sympathy and concern.

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See also:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/books/in-virtual-unreality-charles-seife-unfriends-gullibility.html?_r=0