🎣Catfishing: When humans get caught in the ’net

In modern parlance, “catfishing” has nothing to do with expeditions into nature. Well, maybe it does, but nature of a different kind. Unless you’re talking about [the latest niche industry to find itself embattled in a trade war]( the term generally describes the act of presenting a deceptive identity in online dating. That can be relatively benign (exaggerating how much you know about wines) or extreme (creating a profile with fake details and photographs, and carrying on a relationship with someone under this false identity). A 2010 documentary coined the term, and now pop culture is hooked. Netflix just released a teen rom-com, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, which mates a [John Hughes-era style]( to the contemporary art (and has been criticized for [casting catfishing in a warm light](. The new British reality show The Circle, which has been described as Black Mirror meets Big Brother, encourages its participants to catfish one another in order to win. The trope even extends to politics: Russian attempts to sow political discord via social media have borrowed from the catfishing handbook. Finding examples of the ways the trick permeates these days is like, well, shooting catfish in a barrel. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( [Quartz Obsession] Catfishing September 21, 2018 A fresh catch --------------------------------------------------------------- In modern parlance, “catfishing” has nothing to do with expeditions into nature. Well, maybe it does, but nature of a different kind. Unless you’re talking about [the latest niche industry to find itself embattled in a trade war]( the term generally describes the act of presenting a deceptive identity in online dating. That can be relatively benign (exaggerating how much you know about wines) or extreme (creating a profile with fake details and photographs, and carrying on a relationship with someone under this false identity). A 2010 documentary coined the term, and now pop culture is hooked. Netflix just released a teen rom-com, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, which mates a [John Hughes-era style]( to the contemporary art (and has been criticized for [casting catfishing in a warm light](. The new British reality show The Circle, which has been described as Black Mirror meets Big Brother, encourages its participants to catfish one another in order to win. The trope even extends to politics: Russian attempts to sow political discord via social media have borrowed from the catfishing handbook. Finding examples of the ways the trick permeates these days is like, well, shooting catfish in a barrel. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( by the digits [41%:]( Share of social network users who have used a social networking site to find out more about a potential partner [6%:]( Share of internet users who met their partner or significant other on the internet, in 2013 [31,000:]( Number of men bilked of $4.5 million “by a scheme that promised they could retire to a paradise tended by nude angels” [41%:]( Self-described catfishers who said that loneliness was a motivation [15%:]( Share of Americans on mobile-dating apps, the highest in the world [27%:]( Share of 18- to 24-year-olds who have used a dating app or site, in 2016 [$230 million:]( Estimated losses to romance schemes in 2016 [60%:]( Proportion of (actual) catfish eaten in the US that are imported from abroad jargon watch What's in a name? --------------------------------------------------------------- It was a [2010 documentary film]( that coined the term “catfishing.” According to the husband of one of the scam perpetrators in the film, the idea comes from fishermen “putting sea catfish in with the cod to nip at their tails and keep them active” during overseas transport—because lively fish make for fresher meat. Tales of the catfish and the cod have also been around in Christian parables for centuries. There have always been people who “catfish in real life,” the man went on to explain: “They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.” brief history [1897:]( Edmond Rostand writes Cyrano de Bergerac. [1933:]( Nathaniel West publishes Miss Lonelyhearts. [1951:]( The Lonely Hearts Killers, who scammed women through personals ads, are executed. [1969:]( The cult hit The Honeymoon Killers is released. [2006:]( Successful, mysterious author “JT LeRoy” is exposed as a team of hoaxers. [2010:]( American documentary film Catfish is released. [2012:]( MTV releases its hit reality series Catfish: The TV Show, based on the documentary. [2013:]( The tragic story of top NFL prospect Manti Te’o’s girlfriend is revealed to be a years-long catfishing. million-dollar question How long can this keep going on? --------------------------------------------------------------- The tools of the internet make catfishing easy—but they also make good catfishing hard, as scams get easier to uncover and users get more sophisticated. The team behind the documentary and MTV show have cut the length of their investigations down during the run of the show by employing [more sophisticated searches]( and even commercial databases. One simple piece of advice they give the potentially catfished: Use a laptop, because it’s just easier to do a bunch of searches quickly, something that may keep teens, who are mobile-heavy users, vulnerable. This one weird trick! Beware the hatfisher --------------------------------------------------------------- Online dating is so prevalent nowadays that there are entire established derivatives of catfishing. Take “hatfishing,” which describes bald or balding men who present themselves as possessing a full head of hair. In a recent article for [New York Magazine]( several women described going on dates with men who hid their bald spots, both in their profiles and in person. “I got hatfished a few weeks ago,” one 27-year-old woman said. “When I met him at the bar, he had a hat on and was really cute, but the next day, he texted me this photo of himself with no hat on, and he had the weirdest hairstyle I’d ever seen. It was this wet, curly, half-bleached thing.” quotable “You don’t need the imagination of a Tolstoy or Dickens to create a totally believable but fictional identity. It’s a matter of cut and paste.” [— Cyber-psychologist Mary Aiken, in The Atlantic]( issues They fake it so real they are beyond fake --------------------------------------------------------------- Part of the fascination with catfishing is the way it plays with the porous boundary between “real life” and social media. “We can plan and edit ourselves in this medium,” Krystal D’Costa [writes at Scientific American]( but when it comes to online dating, that planned self eventually has to merge with its meatspace counterpart, where the discrepancy can’t be too great. There’s a [tension]( in that, since “pressures to highlight one’s positive attributes are experienced in tandem with the need to present one’s true (or authentic) self to others.” Catfishing is when that balance goes haywire, and in the way that horror stories take our current tensions and blow them up, [it’s hard to look away](. pop quiz Which is not a species of catfish? Tinderhearted catfishChannel catfishFlathead catfishBlue catfish Correct. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. Take me down this 🎣 hole! A reel good story --------------------------------------------------------------- The Atlantic published a [bizarre story]( last year about a couple that actually got together as a result of catfishing. Emma Perrier was duped by a man on the internet who used the photographs and identity of a male model and actor named Adem Guzel. Midway through the online relationship, she realized he was lying—and then she met and fell in love with actual Adem Guzel. The imposter, whose real name is Alan, had to move to a different town after his name was plastered over newspapers. But he told the Atlantic that despite his shame, he’s happy that it worked out for Perrier and Guzel: “It’s almost like fate.” Giphy watch this! MTV’s show aimed to bring together “couples who’ve interacted solely through their LCD screens,” in sometimes cringe-worthy ways. the way we 🎣 now When catfishing goes geopolitical --------------------------------------------------------------- In 2015, journalist Adrian Chen got [a deep look at the Internet Research Agency]( a Russian organization with 400 employees and a $400,000 budget, that generates social media content in order to fabricate news hoaxes and spread inflammatory opinions. Chen describes them as professional “trolls,” but their tactics are those of the catfisher—only their aim is to inspire fear and distrust instead of comfort and trust. One woman he talked to ran three fictional identities (one a fortune teller), writing 15 posts a day—ten of which had to be non-political, to make the scam work—and 150 to 200 comments, a pace that wore her down. But for all the money behind it, the results are more what you’d get from randos than a new form of spycraft; reflecting three years later, Chen described its efforts as [“inept and haphazard.”]( Giphy poll Sorry, was that depressing? [Click here to vote]( Humans are the worst!Well, at least blue catfish sound cool ...Feeling warm and fuzzy for Emma and Adem 💬let's talk! In yesterday’s poll about [Coke]( 46% of you said you call fizzy sweet drinks “soda,” while 8% are going with “fizzy stuff.” 📧 Colleen said: “Here in Canada we call them ‘soft drinks.’” Dan added: “When we visited Hamburg in the early 1990s, a pint of half coke and half OJ was called a Spezi. (Short for Spezial, pronounced Shpetzi).” ⁉️Gavin wrote: “I’ve always suspected that Coke’s ‘New Coke’ gambit wasn’t a disaster but was a well-planned and completely orchestrated marketing triumph. I remember that when Coke announced ‘New Coke,’ they not only announced their second iteration, they also said they were going to completely stop making what we now know as Coke Classic. As you point out, there were mass protests and there were grocery stores selling out their entire stocks of Coca-Cola when people began hoarding it (and later trying to sell it at a steep markup). It is my belief that Coke never intended to do away with Classic Coke. This was designed to bring back people they’d lost to Pepsi and to whip up a frenzy, which it did with great success. Does anything in your research suggest that I might be correct in this assessment? I just can’t believe there was anyway a very old and beloved institution like Coke was going to get rid of their most iconic single brand.” Good question, Gavin! Snopes addressed this theory (as well as the one that Coke was throwing up a smokescreen to sneak corn syrup into its formula), and [didn’t find any evidence]( to support it. There’s more evidence that New Coke was, indeed, a genuine error on Coca-Cola’s part, and it comes from [this lengthy analysis]( of how the company used focus groups and surveys to market the new formula. The gist? They weren’t wrong to think that New Coke was, in a vacuum, something people would like, but failed to predict how a media frenzy would turn people against it. 📒 [Dive into the archive]( ✏️ [What did you think of today’s email?](mailto:obsession%2Bfeedback@qz.com?cc=&subject=Thoughts%20about%20catfishing&body=) 💡 [What should we obsess over next?](mailto:obsession%2Bideas@qz.com?cc=&subject=Obsess%20over%20this%20next.&body=) 🐰 [Discuss or suggest a topic on r/ObsessionObsessives]( [📬](mailto:replace_with_friends_email@qz.com?cc=obsession%2Bforward@qz.com&subject=Coke%3A%20The%20secret%20recipe%20for%20global%20domination&body=Thought%20you%27d%20enjoy.%20%0ARead%20it%20here%20%E2%80%93%20http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2Femail%2Fquartz-obsession%2F1398459)[Forward this email to a friend](mailto:replace_with_friends_email@qz.com?cc=obsession%2Bforward@qz.com&subject=Catfishing%3A%20When%20humans%20get%20caught%20in%20the%20%E2%80%99net&body=Thought%20you%27d%20enjoy.%20%0ARead%20it%20here%20%E2%80%93%20http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2Femail%2Fquartz-obsession%2F1398459) 🎁 [Get the Quartz Tabsession Chrome Extension]( Today’s email was written by [Amy X. 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