How did catfishing come into our society?

catfishing is.Along with the age of digitalization came a lot of positive aspects. You could contact your friends and family more often even if they are far away. You could meet new people online and even find your true love via dating sites or social media websites. But meeting people online also has its downsides, as will become clear below.

“A catfish is a person who creates fake personal profiles on social media sites using someone else's pictures and false biographical information to pretend to be someone other than themselves. These "catfish" usually intend to trick an unsuspecting person or persons into falling in love with them.” 

A catfish usually does not have a goal to achieve by catfishing. They do it because they are insecure about themselves and the online world gives them a way to escape reality, or they do it for their own entertainment. In some cases they do it for revenge, or for a prank.” The term “catfish” came to be because of the  show Catfish. This show is based on the 2010 film Catfish and is co-hosted by Nev Schulman and Max Joseph. Together, they try to help people figure out if the person they are talking to on the internet is hiding behind someone else’s photos by using fake profiles or not.

At the end of the movie “catfish” where Nev finally meets his catfisher Angela, her husband explains the story with a methaphor. He explains how fisherman used to have the problem that their cod becaome bored while they were being tanked on the journey from Alaska to China. Because of that, the cod would lose their taste and texture. At one point, fisherman came up with an idea to put catfish in the same tank as the cod. Catfish are a natural predator so they would chase the cod to keep them from being bored which would lead to better quality cod.

The comparison from this story with Nev's his catfish story is that the catfish (Angela) lured Nev in her online territory and kept him moving around, “stimulating” him. This is a very good way to explain what happened because almost all of the catfish have a motive of why they are doing something. The story about the cod and catfish is of course questionable but for the purpose of explaining why this phenomenon got its name  does'n' matter.

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As I said before the age of digitalization brought a lot of positive but also negative  with it. Catfishing has probably been around since social media exists but it came to light when Nev Schulman released his documentary Catfish. Nev believed that what happened to him was a thing that would not happen to a lot of people. But after the release of his documentary he got hundreds of messages and emails from people that had been through the same stuff and were ashamed that this had happened to them. But because they saw the documentary from Nev, they realised that they were not the only people. So, catfishing had been around for a long time, but the release of the documentary sort of puts the capper on it. As a result of all these reactions from people who wanted help from Nev, MTV aired a now tv-show called ‘Catfish’ in which Nev and his co-host Max Joseph try to help people who think they are being catfished.

In our offline world, we have to keep us to one identity, it is not possible to be multiple personae at the same time. It may change over time a bit because you are growing or getting older, but you still inhabit that same body and that is something that cannot change. In the online world, the concept of identity is very different; there are no rules on how to behave online and you do not posess a life body online. You can diffuse and melt into different personae, you can have as many online personae as you like(Donath, 1999; 29). You can see this in the following example of the story of Manti Te'o's.

The most popular example of catfishing is when University of Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o was a victim of catfishing in 2013. Te’o told made it public that on September 12th, 2012, both his girlfriend and grandmother had died. He had said that his girlfriend, Lenny Kakua, had died in a car crash whilst battling leukemia. Because Kakua had told him to keep playing if something ever happened to her, because of that he played his best season yet for Notre Dame. He captured the hearts of many sports fans in the United States because of that. But on January 16th, due to an anonymous tip by email, Deadspin published an article saying that Kakua had never existed and the whole relationship was a hoax by a man named Ronaiah Tuiasospoo. Here you can see that Tuisasospoo's offline identity is a male and he cannot deceive that from other people. But he created a different persona online because the online world has the possibilities to do so. His online idenitity was a woman who had cancer and died, fairly different than his offline persona. The pictures that were used to make Kakua’s fake profile, were actually pictures of Diane O’Meara and she said that she had never had any contact with Te’o. 

Dr. Phil McGraw, left, interviews Ronaiah Tuiasosopo The Associated Press

Some people accused Te’o of creating a fake girlfriend to get some publicity and sympathy. A part of the reason for the suspicion is that Deadspin also figured out that Tuiasosopo called Te’o after he killed Kakua off to explain that it was all a hoax. Te’o never came forward with that news hence raising suspicion. But Te’o insisted that it was a hoax and did not know anything. He said that 22-year-old Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was the person behind the hoax, the person he first thought was Lennay’s cousin. Eventually, Te’o and Tuiasospoo both spoke publically on the Dr. Phil Show. Tuiasosopo admit to edeceiv Te’o, and that he fell in love with him.  He says that at one point he knew what he was doing is wrong and it had to stop. This explains why he killed Lennay off for good with leukemia. But it did not feel right because it was not the truth, so he called Te’o and came clean. He blamed the pain of being molested as a child on the fact that he catfished Te’o. Like most catfishers, he created a fake identity online to escape from his past.

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Catfishing is very similar to phising (reeling in victims online and steal their identities). The difference between the two is that a catfish uses someone else's their identity to lure people and phising is that someone lures you online and tries to steal your identity. It is actually legal – in the U.S. – to pretend to be someone else online. It could violate the terms of service of the site that has been used, but it is not illegal by law. But it also depends if the person who catfishes lies to obtain something specific. For example, if a 40-year old man pretends to be a 16-year old boy online to obtain explicit photos of a 15-year old girl he would be breaking several laws. But phishing is a bit different. Phishing is used for identity theft. A lot of people have received at least once in their lifetime an email from his/hers bank. But in fact, that was not from their real bank, but from phishers who try to persuade you to send your bank account information to them (in that case you think it is really your bank).

But there is of course an other side of catfishing that people – and the documentary – do not really pay attention to: the people whose pictures have been used by the catfisher. These people do not get a voice in the documentary, they only get to say if they were the person the victim was talking to, and nothing more. For instance the story about Josh Duggar and Matthew McCarthy. McCarthy is a DJ based in Los Angeles and Josh Duggar is an American television personality and political activist. In 2015, Josh had an account on Ashley Madison, Twitter and OkCupid but he used pictures of the DJ. Josh claims he has found the picture just by googling ‘random guy’. McCarthy has sought damages claiming he has lost gigs and has received nasty messages referring to him as ‘Duggar’s boy toy’ and DJ Duggar, as a result of the scandal. (Ruiz, 2017) As a result of this, McCarthy has decided to sue Duggar for defarmation.

The people who catfish are – as mentioned before – mostly people who are insecure about themselves or/and have had bad experiences in their youth. But of course this is not the case with every catfish. The best example I have for this is an episode of catfish from season two called “Artis & Jess”. The story is about Artis who thought he was dating a girl, who resembles a porn star, named Jess online and was even prepared to give up his current girlfriend whom he has three kids with. Jess only has one picture of herself on Facebook, which is immediately suspicious. After a while of searching, Nev and Max found out that the person in the picture is not the person Artis is talking to. The person he was talking to is called Justin. But apparently Justin had another motive to Catfish people than the normal reasons like revenge or escaping from their own lives. Justin was catfishing because he wanted to make a point. He kind of saw himself the Batman against online cheaters. 

As Tsatsou describes in her work is that most of the time, the identity you have in the real "offline" world, stands apart from the identity you have in the "online" world. 

"Attachment identity is often not expressed or accomplished offline due to personal or systemic constraints and it can find space for fulfilment through practices in cyberspace that in turn can differ from offline acts and life experiences." (Tsatsou, 2014; 104) 

For example here with Justin; in real life he does not flirt with other boys who are in a relationship and see if they fall for his trap. He is restricted in a way (he is a boy, obviously), but in the online world these resstrictments do not exist. He can easily portray as a woman by using someone else's pictures. This does not mean that it does not say anything about the personality from Justin himself, it is there in his personality, but you do not see it in his "offline" world because he is restricted. It first started off as a joke – as it almost always does – but then Justin started to realize that some men he was talking to as Jess, where emotionally cheating on their real-life partner. He did not find that okay.  The confrontation of the two in that episode did not go well. Justin stepped out if his car and while he was walking towards Artis, Nev and ax he was slow clapping. They even almost got into a fight, but eventually Justin walked away and that was it.

Catfish Memes MTV 2017 Heavy, Inc.

In a situation like this, you could ask yourself who is to blame for this. You could say that the guilt lies with Justin, because he led someone else to believe that he was a beautiful girl who was in love with. Even if he tried to catch the people who are emotionally cheating on their partners, which a lot of people would also consider not okay, he did mislead someone else and lied multiple times. But if you would look at Artis, you would question him too. One reason for that is that ‘Jess’ had only one picture of herself on her facebook page. Second, they only lived 20 minutes apart from each other. Third, they have never spoken on the phone. And the last thing is that Jess talked openly about being single on Facebook and her Facebook wall had a lot of comments from people who are questioning if Jess is real. With all this in mind Artis still just wanted to leave the mother of his kids. He was already emotionally cheating on her, so you could say he had it coming.

Catfish as a negative effect of globalization