Viewing people on the internet as suspect due to hoaxsters is to give in to their cruel mindsets

AT THE beginning of this week, I was working to investigate the apparent disappearance of a Syrian blogger, Amina Arraf.

As you may have heard by now, Amina, supposedly a gay girl writing from Damascus, turned out to be a married 40-year-old in Edinburgh, Tom MacMaster, who had written up a kidnapping of his fictional blog creation because he wanted a break while he holidayed in Turkey.

Things got stranger when one of the sources for the evidence that MacMaster was fake, Paula Brooks, turned out to also have a remarkably thin online presence.

Brooks was the founder of a lesbian website, Lez Get Real, but none of her co-workers had ever met her. She claimed to be deaf, and whenever anyone talked to her over the phone, she’d speak via her father, a military man who used to work for the intelligence services.

Further investigation revealed Paula Brooks was also a man; the voice on the phone was his. The two faux internet lesbians were apparently unaware of each other’s identities, and had, in fact, flirted with each other online.

I had a ringside seat to this increasingly bizarre circus because my partner Liz Henry, a blogger for the women’s media company BlogHer, was one of the chief amateur investigators who uncovered the two fake identities.

Liz is no stranger to internet detective stories: a few years ago she helped unpick a fake grassroots campaign during the US presidential primaries, and before that had befriended and interviewed a net hoaxer, Odin Soli, a middle-aged American who had blogged as Acanit, another young lesbian Muslim girl.

I watched her pick apart two frauds, at times in defiance of professional journalists and fact-checkers. I’d hear one half of a phone conversation, which would consist of Liz politely inquiring of a press contact exactly why they believed a Syrian who had never met anyone in Syria was real, or gently advising a business partner of “Paula Brooks” to perhaps reconsider their colleague’s existence.

How do you detect such frauds? I’m sure internet con artists are already adjusting their strategies to compensate for the more blatant holes in the Amina/Brooks saga, but a few of the warning signs Liz spotted early on are worth repeating. In the Amina case, absolutely no one had met Amina, and she wriggled out of any situation that might pin her down. She failed to turn up to press interviews in Damascus; she claimed Skype was not working for online phone calls; when a close online friend wanted to call her, she claimed she had to throw away her mobile for fear she was being tracked.

In the case of Brooks, few of her colleagues questioned that her “father” was the only way a deaf person could communicate via phone (even though third-party relay services are regularly used by the hearing impaired). Like “Amina”, she had multiple strategies to subtly evade questioning or confirmations of her identity.

Seen more broadly, Amina’s and Brooks’s strategies had less to do with the internet and more to do with the timeless strategies of the con. They carefully constructed their interactions so it would seem rude or inconceivable to ask the obvious questions that would bring the whole construct down. As soon as journalists, bloggers and other online investigators started asking those questions, the edifice quickly crumbled.

I’ve seen articles mentioning all kinds of commandments and internet cliches relating to these incidents: the Amina case proves minorities are listened to more credulously than others; the Brooks case proves that the internet undermines trust, and you should ignore the unreal net world in favour of people you know in real life.

Having watched this all play out – and heard more directly those who were hurt and betrayed by both frauds – I’ve come to almost the opposite conclusions.

My long-held impression is that women and minority or foreign groups are often completely misunderstood or ignored in many online contexts. Liz’s primary trick to uncovering the fraud seemed to be to pay more attention to what these fictional constructs were saying, not less.

She was anything but cynical – instead, she took everything they said at face value and followed it where it led, even if it seemed to lead to contradictions. If “Amina” had been listened to more carefully, as a human rather than just an exciting story; if her readers were listening to others in the region, and able to compare those experiences, the gaps in her story would have become more readily apparent far more quickly.

And as for online trust: one of the reasons why these hoaxsters felt they could do what they did is because they, at some level, refused to believe what they did online really mattered. They seemed to feel the vulnerable people they misled, the fictions they weaved, had no consequences because those people were not directly in front of them, suffering in person.

To view people on the internet as somehow more suspect or unreal because of these incidents seems to me to be playing to exactly that sociopathic frame of mind. To prevent more tragedies like this, we need to teach each other that people “on the internet” are just as real as those in our everyday lives, not less; and that hurting them through lies, whatever your supposed motive, no less despicable.