The Consequences Of Catfishing And The Social Media

The term Catfish is defined as someone who pretends to be someone else, especially on the internet. Found

How many Facebook friends do you have, and how many of those friends have you spoken to in the past week, month, or even year? Are there any people that you follow on Instagram whom you’ve never introduced yourself to? The answers may come as a surprise. The use of social media makes it effortless to connect with friends and family. However, it also allows us to to catch a glimpse the lives of those we’re never met. Depending on how much information is shared on one’s profile, it can allow a person to determine enough about them to consider them a friend. Conversely, those people who have never met you have access to all of your information that you allow “friends” on Facebook to see. This is an alarming discovery, especially considering that the concept of “catfishing” (creating a fake profile online and pretending to be someone

The other side: “The Face” Catfishers go to Facebook to collect information from people to be “the face” of their false profile and start deceiving people. Emily Burns, an editor at Berry agree, “She had been scammed out of over $2,500 and was on the verge of selling her SUV to send the scammer more money. She was planning her future around the lies he told her”. She believes that Catfish is still present as one of her coworker, Aundrus Poole, is being used as “the face” to deceive others with the promise of a future together when in reality all is a fraud or scam to steal money from them. How a person could be so easily deceived?

It is not uncommon for someone to exaggerate the truth or to leave out facts about themselves on the web. In fact, you may even find that the person you thought you knew on the internet is nothing like their profiles in real life. Whether it is to stand out in the crowd or to fool someone into thinking you are someone else entirely, you should not believe everything you see or read online. With photo enhancements, little white lies, and the scam termed catfishing, you just never really know who you are talking to or what their intentions are. Michele Fleming and Debra Rickwood, authors of “Teens in Cyberspace”, determine that parents and the public share the concern of teens encountering predators and pedophiles on the internet and could lead to inappropriate relationships on and off the web. The young generation typically communicates with peers and people close in age, however, Fleming and Rickwood advise “Even though many teens appear Net-savvy, they still need to be reminded of the potential dangers lurking online. There may be many friends in cyberspace but there are undoubtedly a number of

Googling myself was quite interesting, to say the least. When I googled my name and hometown, Brittany Mann Shelton CT, the first two links that appear are my facebook and twitter profile. The links that follow that are all of the times I received honor roll in intermediate school and high school. However, there were also links that were not about me but were other peoples that have the same name as me. One of them was a LinkedIn profile that was not mine and the other was about a girl who is an ex-Oregon putter. This link talked about how great she was in the NCAA Indoor Championships. Next, I googled my Instagram username and I was shocked. The first two links that pop up are links to my Instagram account one of which isn’t even the Instagram link.

Online predators and Stalkers can easily gain access to social media users’ personal information by either requesting to be a user’s friend or simply finding a way around the user's privacy settings. According to June Ahn, chat rooms are public and is an unmonitored space where online predators are more likely to be. “Adolescents are less likely to be targeted for unwanted sexual solicitation in social media than chat rooms.”(Ahn, June) I have found that, 412 adolescents were more likely to talk with strangers. This is hazardous for young children and adolescents because their lack of life experience leads them to blindly accept all friend request. The effort to seem popular by having many friends online can damage credibility and truth worthiness.

The above mentioned example is one of many questioning the credibility of the social networking sites. The fact that anyone can go to a person’s profile and save his/her picture to be used as desired is uncomfortable and disturbing. Another method for the disruption of ethical boundaries in regards to these networking channels is their utilization to conduct predatory marketing. The level of discomfort is high when a product/service is offered to a user on the basis of the needs assessment done by the exploitation of personal information. Some employers are also the culprits due to the fact that they make hiring decisions on the basis of prospective employee’s social network activities. These and many other scenarios lead problem solvers to come up with alternatives and implement productive decisions.

You’re scrolling through instagram,snapchat or any other media platform. You post a picture you like; however, it does not get that many likes compared to your fellow peers so you take it down. Even though you think nobody noticed, your followers get the notification. You scroll some more and notice that someone requested you and tried to communicate. The person is using the same picture the instagram model posted. You ignore it. All of a sudden your favorite music artist uploads a story which is controversial. This results in a fight in the comment section and you are apart of it. The person you are arguing with is younger than you but using such vulgar language to defend their argument. What do you do? Do you respond back or do you forget it or should you explain to them that they are too young to use that type of language. Online networking has been around for usually quite a while. With the advantages, it has drawbacks . A lot of online networking influences people’s lives day to day existence, claiming various ages groups including children as well as teens. Public networking allows for a platform to state whatever they need to say with consequences. Interactive multimedia is harmful to the youth commonly, the teenagers and kids, it lowers kids self-esteem and creates a communication barrier as well as creating a false identity resulting in Catfishing. Catfishing is when a fake photo is posted to extort a person. It either inflicts feelings on them or causes pain as

Since the introduction of the World Wide Web and mainstream use of the internet to access information in 1990, the way people interact with each other has changed. Social media has opened up new mediums for people to communicate with each other. People exchange messages on Facebook, post tweets on Twitter, and “selfies” on Instagram. These new mediums have also changed the way people find romance and love. In this modern era, it is not uncommon to see people dating other people they have met on the internet. This has opened the door for “catfishing”, lying about your true identity on the internet in order to lure someone into a relationship. This has become so common that Molly McHugh of digitaltrends.com4 has described it as an epidemic. This essay will explore how catfishing has developed with the introduction of social media, why people catfish, and why talking over the internet makes it difficult to spot when someone is presenting a false identity. It will also identify the impacts that catfishing has had on society.

In 2006, Megan Meier, a Missouri teen, committed suicide after a fake account made by an adult male befriended her on Facebook, initiated a relationship, and broke up with her (Hawkins). There are many cases similar to this where people change their identity online to accomplish goals. Megan was involved in a “Catfish” where the befriended profile formed a relationship under a false name. These are possibly the most common crime when it comes to changing your identity. There is even

In this paper, I have discussed how online dating is becoming popular and how the individuals are usually deceived by it. I have also discussed how the new television show Catfish is turning out to be a great example of how social media has changed online dating. All in all, I have covered the negative outcomes of online dating.

Online social networks have become increasingly populated arenas for much of today’s population, especially with regards to high school and college students. Networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, Twitter, etc., enable users to create an identity and present it to others by allowing them to share various aspects of their lives. Because individuals select their own content, the resulting representation can be either a true or imaginative reflection of the user. The attitudes, perspectives, behaviours and actions each individual chooses to present, shape their identity within the social media universe. Like most other web-based content, the pursuit of authenticity is assumed to be at the heart of these social media networks, playing an important role in our online interactions and our decisions about what web content we believe to be reliable. But, what about when the network structure allows users to create, post, and interact with anonymous identities? Anonymity eliminates the need decipher authenticity, however, it creates an issue by protecting the negative actions of empowered users.

* While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone consists of visible profiles that display an articulated list of Friends1 who are also users of the system. Profiles are unique pages where one can "type oneself into being" (Sundén, 2003, p. 3). After joining an SNS, an individual is asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which typically include descriptors such as age, location, interests, and an "about me" section. Most sites also encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites

We are introduced to Jason Fortuny, who posted an ad on craigslist, posing as a female. He posted the ad in the casual encounters section and received 178 responses. In some of the responses, photos of the men was attached, and Fortuny decided to post the pictures along the names of the men. We are also introduced to a woman named Julie, who posted a story about her ex on the website dontdatehimgirl.com, which also turned out to be a lie. The text shows how easy it is to ruin people's lives, posing as a fake person and telling lies

There have been situations where people have been lured to meet up with who they’d consider a friend under false pretenses. Getting catfished can put one in a dangerous situation.