The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog (or a Make-Believe Syrian Lesbian)

Posted on | June 12, 2011 | 17 Comments

Why do people never learn to be skeptical of stuff like this?

In recent days, the world has followed closely the saga of Amina Arraf, the blogger who presented herself online as “A Gay Girl in Damascus” and who drew attention with her passionate writings about the Syrian government’s crackdown on Arab Spring protesters. Those writings stopped last Tuesday, and a posting to the blog, ostensibly written by a cousin, said she had been hauled away by government security agents.
News of her disappearance became an Internet and media sensation. The U.S. State Department started an investigation. But almost immediately skeptics began asking: Has anyone ever actually met Amina? Two days after her disappearance, images presented on her blog as being of Amina were revealed to have been taken from the Facebook page of a London woman.
And on Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia. . . .
[Tom] MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is now working on his master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience.

How many times do people have to make fools out of themselves over these “too good to check” stories before they wise up to the telltale clues of a hoax?

Whatever happened to common sense? Shouldn’t it be obvious, for example, that the son of the late oil minister of Nigeria isn’t going to send e-mails to random strangers asking for their help in recovering a multi-million dollar fortune? And shouldn’t it be obvious that the sex-crazed teenager in the online chat room is actually an undercover cop working on a Dateline NBC sting?

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

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Comments

  • Joe

    For a second, I was sure you were going to say Anamika was involved in this charade. 

  • Anonymous

    “shouldn’t it be obvious that the sex-crazed teenager in the online chat room is actually an undercover cop working on a Dateline NBC sting?”

    You sound bitter.

  • MrPaulRevere

    Amanda Marcotte must be devastated.

  • Anonymous

     No, she only deceives herself.

  • Pingback: A Gay Girl in Damascus Blog Was Hoax «ScrollPost.com

  • Lance McCormick

    Wait– that New Yorker cartoon was from *1993*?   Wow.  Who was even on the Internet back then?  Wasn’t AOL’s heyday a little later?

    Doing a smidgen of research, Yahoo! dates to 1994.  So, um, wow.

    In other news, I’m apparently old.  Yay me.

  • Anonymous

    So some guy in Georgia wants to be a gay Syrian Woman, that’s gonna leave a mark.

  • http://theothermccain.com/2011/06/07/death-of-a-blogger/#comment-222940138 Anamika

    What if you were so awake and aware that you couldn’t help but feel where you were at? Not be able to deceive yourself? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? How could you fail to become enlightened in such a condition? Have one kind of thought and it creates this loud feeling and all your feelings were loud, your whole feeling tone was loud and like stones into the lake every thought and expression made particular kinds of waves in that lake of your consciousness. You would have to become someone new all the time, someone new each day, you’d hardly be recognizable except as a chameleon perhaps. Oh to be such a one. Where is such a one, who doesn’t keep recreating themselves in predictable ways?

  • http://saberpoint.blogspot.com Stogie Chomper

    My thoughts exactly!  Har har!

  • http://twitter.com/s_dog spot_the_dog

    “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

    Woof.

  • http://twitter.com/s_dog spot_the_dog

    Where the media keep falling for these kinds of things, it’s mostly a case of “They Want To Believe” meets “Too Good To Check”. 

    Compose precisely the kind of narrative you know some certain audience segment is hankering for, and they’ll grab it with both hands.

    Our public broadcaster, the ABC, fell for something like that (albeit on a smaller scale) recently.  It collected a fair few other Lefties in its wake as well.  Alene Composta: http://j.mp/eWH10Q

  • Anonymous

    Get off my e-lawn, you young punk! I remember when there was no Internet, only ARPANet!

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  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Thank you Joe. When I first clicked on here, I was worried to death Anamika would not make any comments. I’m so delighted you thought to say something that might invite her to brighten our day. The thought would never have occurred to me.

  • Pingback: Ed Driscoll » On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re not a ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’

  • Pingback: Moe Lane » QotD, The Irony Blinds Me edition.

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