Stealing appearances

Catfish is a term that was created by a guy who was fell in love with a woman over the internet. He and this woman talked over the phone, through messenger and on Facebook. On her Facebook he could see her friends and her family. She told him that she loved him and all these things about her that ultimately ended up being false. He became suspicious when she told him that she could sing and she was able to sing the songs he requested for her to sing within the next twenty minutes. So, him and his friends ended up driving to where this girl lived to see if she was actually real. When they got there, hey figured out that it was all a hoax. The young woman that he fell in love with was an older, married lady named Angela. She and her husband has one child and her husband had disabled twins from his first marriage. It was obvious that Angela had made up every person on the Facebook profile and had made up a life for a random person she found on the internet. I do not think that this is morally ok. I think people who go to the extent that Angela did are pathological liars. In class we discussed if having different platforms on social medial was the same as lying and I disagree. I think it is ok to post different things on Facebook than Instagram. In the same since that you act and talk differently around your friends than your parents and authorities, you post different things and word what you want to say differently on social media. However, I do not understand why people would write something and post it on the internet but also say that they wouldn't actually say it in person to anyone. I feel like if something is going to be on the internet, a lot more people will see it and it will essentially be there forever. But if you just say it out loud, it isn't accessible to everyone and you have more room to change your mind about things. In class, we also talked about if anyone had ever been catfished. One of my friends her senior year of high school was on Facebook and came across a profile that had pictures of her on it. It was under a different name but all of her selfies were uploaded on it and pictures with only certain friends had been uploaded to it. She ended up having to email Facebook multiple times to get the account deleted. I think this goes to show how accessible things on the internet are. People really need to check their security setting on their profiles because stealing someones appearance is a very easy thing to do now.