The Problems with Catfishing

Summary

During this week's contemporary moral issues class, we watched a documentary on catfishing. For those of you who don't know catfishing is when a person pretends to be someone, they are not to develop a relationship with an unsuspecting victim. The documentary follows the story of Nev Schulman, a photographer from New York who was lead to believe he was talking to the older sister of an art prodigy named Megan. Nev and Megan developed a relationship until Megan sent Nev a video of her singing which Nev recognized as the same video of someone else singing. Instead of confronting Megan about this like a normal person Nev decided to fly out of the state to catch her in the lie. When he gets there, he meets a married middle-aged woman. The woman claims to be Megan’s mother and tells him that Megan lives far away. She takes her to see the supposed art prodigy which turned out to be a lie too. He eventually tells her he knows and they have a conversation about why she did what she did.

It was then revealed that the mother made numerous fake accounts to lure Nev into thinking he was in a relationship with her. She pretended to have an art prodigy as a daughter at first, then an older daughter that was interested in him. When Nev asks her why she did this the woman breaks into tears and explains that taking care of her handicapped twin sons didn’t allow her to follow her dream of becoming an artist so in a way Megan represents her failed dreams. The story did have a happy ending though. Megan’s supposed mother went on to delete her fake Facebook accounts, and start a website which advertised her art for sale.

Commentary

This documentary did raise the importance of and give name to an important issue: catfishing. Catfishing is becoming a more and more serious issue in our ever-growing dependence on technology to find a romantic partner. While this seems harmless to most people catfishing can lead to some serious consequences. When someone is catfishing they have manipulated someone into believing everything they say. However, since the lie needs to be protected, this leads to far too many times where the person catfishing is put into a situation which harms the other psychologically. Nev was lucky enough to find out before it was too late, but someone may have flown to another state with the intention of meeting them just to find out they were being catfished. This is not just a hypothetical. I have known people that leave the state just to find out they were being catfished.

It doesn’t just stop there the person catfishing will often make up excuses for why they didn’t see them like they agreed to. Since they don’t want the person to get mad at them they usually make up a serious excuse. In Nev’s case, the woman pretended that Megan was in rehab for her drinking problem and couldn’t see him. If Nev believed Megan was real this would put a lot of emotional stress on him, like it does for so many that are being catfished.

With the rise of Tinder, catfishing has become an even more serious problem. Since the people are unaware of what is real or unreal, the distress they feel is real. They are also unable to move on and find someone else, which puts them in a tight spot. If we are to do away with catfishing we need to find a way to prevent it from happening. One way to stop catfishing is to google search images to see if they are linked to anyone else’s name. However, this process is too complicated for most so we need to simplify it by building it in into the dating app. Then we’ll have a chance at stopping catfishing.