the Kaycee Nicole thing

Blog! Watching the fake lesbian blogger scandal play out across the internet, I've been reminded of the somewhat similar "Kaycee Nicole thing" (it always seemed to be called the "Kaycee Nicole thing") in which a grown woman turned up on numerous websites as a teenager suffering from terminal leukemia. Presents were sent, money too, until eventually as seems to have happened here, the lies began to fold in on themselves, inconsistencies began to emerge just as the real Kaycee Nicole couldn't appear.

Metafilter turned detective and exposed the hoax in a similar way to Andy Carvin's Twitter led investigation here and there was a certain adrenalin rush in turning detective to try and gather scraps of evidence as to how this person had lied and who they were.  On reflection, what we did (and I should note my part was tiny probably on reflection) wasn't unlike the work done by certain other websites when looking for people doing cruelty to domestic pets, but we had righteous indignation on our side.

But the effect the Kaycee Nicole thing had, at least for a little while, just as this will, hopefully for as short a time, is to make us weary of who we're communicating with on-line.  When people are just user names and when, as was the case here, photos are not necessarily much proof as to someone's real identity, such things as "friendship" can become sinister, dark things, in which you're second guessing everything that's said, something which some outsiders might consider healthy, but can only stultify channels of communication.

There has been one entertaining twist, if entertaining is the word considering the fallout  that might yet lead to violence against people in the LGBT community in Syria, some of whom may have exposed themselves to danger in an attempt to track down what had happened to the girl who didn't exist, is that the two blokes involved did exactly the sort of thing which usually happens in sitcoms:

"He said he felt sure that no one would discover his true identity until the story of Amina began to unravel. He said his connection to Amina was purely coincidental and started when Amina commented on a post on the Lez Get Real site in February. It “was a major sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax,” he said.

"In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."

I also can't help thinking of this scene from Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know (which is a massive spoiler if you haven't seen the film yet).