Do you remember when Facebook notes were a thing? I wrote this in 2013 and it just popped up in my memories the other day. Apparently I had deep thoughts on the subject of catfishing, which was then a relatively new phenomenon. I remember the whole Manti Te’o story, and I’ll admit I thought it was bizarre on the one hand and entirely too plausible on the other. So here’s a flashback for you… you know, not to go off on a tangent, but 2013 seems like it wasn’t that long ago, but in fact it was nine years ago, which is really weird to me. Is it really 2022? 2022 seems like a science-fiction year, doesn’t it? Anyway, I digress, here’s an article I wrote about catfishing nine freaking years ago.
The big news in the sports world this week concerns Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o and the news that his girlfriend, who was thought to have died of cancer some months back, in fact never existed. His relationship with her existed only online. Now there is considerable debate whether Te’o was complicit in this hoax. This is exacerbated by the fact that Te’o claimed to have met her in person, claims he has since retracted.
Watching ESPN, CNN and other news and sports outlets today and yesterday, I saw a lot of the talking head pundits throwing around the word “catfish.” This is a recent phenomenon, referring to the documentary film Catfish. In the movie a man travels to meet in person a woman with whom he’d had an online relationship, only to find she was not what she had represented herself to be.
Evidently this is a widespread issue, and it got me to thinking. There are a lot of people engaging in relationships online, relationships that do not extend into the real world, and as such do not include any of the usual mileposts that relationships typically do. For example, if you’re dating someone you met through face-to-face interaction, it’s normally not that difficult to figure out if they’re misrepresenting themselves. But if you’re dealing with someone you met online, interact with online, and only have contact with online, then all you know of them is what they choose to allow you to know. With the availability of photos on the internet, it’s possible for someone to create a profile on a social media site and populate it with pictures of someone else. And since there are so many people out there who constantly take photos of themselves, a determined catfish can create a backstory out of whole cloth to accompany a whole number of photos. And then: poof, a person appears with friends, contacts, a whole life. Yet no one anywhere has seen or met this person.
It’s almost scary if you think about it.
But it happens all the time, and it happens for a variety of reasons. Oftentimes, one who perpetrates such a scam is of such low self-esteem that they lack the confidence to present themselves as who they really are. So instead they co-opt the appearance of someone they consider more attractive. As seen in the movie Catfish and its spinoff series which airs on MTV, this is a blind alley. You can develop an intense relationship online, but there’s nowhere to take it. Meeting in person is out because to do so would expose the lie.
So what happens then? That’s what I’m curious about. Because not everyone who finds themselves in this position has access to a camera crew and the resources to travel to where the other person is to confront them directly. I wonder how often these relationships fizzle because one person just gets tired of the excuses, tired of being put off, and realizes that something isn’t quite right.
The sad truth is that this isn’t going away. The anonymity provided by the internet allows for the perfect shield behind which to hide and perpetuate this fiction. And so assuming Manti Te’o is telling the truth and he is the victim here, you can be sure he won’t be the last well-known person to be taken in by such a web of deceit.
Voice of Morgan Freeman: no, he would not be.
