Catfish Online Deception

The documentary ‘Catfish’ started when Yaniv had an online relationship with Megan. Yaniv Schulman is a photographer living in New York City. In 2007 one his pictures was published in magazines and newspapers. At his office he got an package with a painting of his picture. The girl who painted it named Abby, a 8 year old girl living in Michigan. Nev and Abby began to talk true facebook and send each other pictures and paintings. Nev also talked on the phone with Angela, Abby’s mom. They become friends on facebook and the family of Angela en Abby also wanted to be friends with Nev on facebook.
Abby’s half-sister, Megan, is very interested in Nev. Nev his brother and cousin, two film makers, started to document Nev’s online relationship with

Megan. Megan is a dancer and singer. She send some recorded songs to Nev. Nev investigate this and sees that all of the recorded songs aren’t from Megan. So they started to figure out why Megan is lying and even if she really exist.
They take the plane to Michigan and started to go to Megan’s house. The house they find is empty, even if all Nev’s letters are in the mailbox. Then they go to Angela’s house. Angela is home, but doesn’t look like the pictures she puts on facebook. Her husband, Vince, also doesn’t look like the pictures. Nev and Angela drive to the beach where Abby is with a friend. Nev talks to Abby and her friend and finds out that Abby doesn’t paint and that she only saw Megan some years ago.
Nev talks to Angela about all of this. Angela confess that she painted all the paintings and that she pretends to be Megan. Because of her friendship with Nev she was reconnected with the painting world and that kept her going.
After the documentary, Yaniv received a lot of reactions from other people who are also dealing with the same problem. His brother, cousin and he decided to make a serie about it and help the people to know the truth, just like him.
Meaning of the term (1)
In that documentary, Vince, the husband of angela told them a story about a catfish. He says that live cod were shipped from Alaska to China. But by the time the fish got to China, the flesh would become tasteless by inactiveness. So some guy had the idea of putting catfish into the tank to chase the fish around and keep them moving. Vince finished to say ‘I thank god for the catfish, because life would be boring if we didn’t have someone nipping at our vines’. Vince talks of how there are people in everyone's lives who keep us active, always on our toes and always thinking. It is implied that he believes Angela to be such a person.
Online deception
Catfishing is a form of online deception or identity based deception.

Online deception is one of the new and most common social phenomena of our age. A specific type of online deception is the identity based deception. Caspi & Gorsky (2006.)(3) defined identity deception as “knowingly transmitting messages to a receiver with the intent to foster a false belief or conclusion.” In addition Hancock (n.d.) (4) mentions that it is easy to pretend that someone is better than in reality by manipulating or obscuring their identity trough information and communication technologies. Meanwhile, there are already a number of studies done about identity deception. At first research of Caspi (2006.) (3) discovered that 29% off the people who answered the questionnaire had sometimes, often or always deceive online. 27% of them lied about their sex, 45% lied about their age, 44% lied about their residence, 21% about occupation and 20% lied about their marital status. Beside that, research of Lu (2008.) (5) showed that people who are high internet dependants are more likely to engage in online interpersonal deception than those who are low internet

dependents.
Online deception is determined by several factors as the deceiver, the social media, the deceptive act and the potential victim. These factors determine the level of difficulty for a deceiver to participate the online deception. (Tsikerdekis & Zeadally, 2014.)
Motivation
There are many different reasons why people create false identities online. Some of them are quite simple like boredom but some other are more complex. What occurs in almost all of the different reasons is that creating this false identity gives people satisfaction by having total control over the way others perceive them. It gives them a certain joy to be able to achieve depth of human connection online that they mostly can’t achieve in reality. (7)
One of the reasons why people create false identities is revenge. Creating a fake profile gives the ‘catfisher’ the opportunity to strike back at someone by whom they have been hurt. For example, in the Catfish TV show, a woman named Mhissy created a fake profile to seduce a friend of her who had interest in the same man as she did, hoping that the fake person would keep her away from him. Another insight into the mind of a revengeful hoaxer comes from Chelsea Browning, She started her profile to take vengeance at a person by whom she was cyberbullied. She made the profile of a male model character in order to bully back.
A second reason is homophobia.

Some people are scared of being ostracized for their sexuality. They create a fake profile of the opposite sex in order to interact with people of the same gender as the ‘catfisher’.
A third reason is addiction to attention. They can get this attention by making fake profiles in order to still their crave for attention. Some of them can simply be addicted to making fake profiles and so they master themselves in the art of the catfish. These people often have multiple fake profiles.
The fourth reason is sexual-identity anxiety also named sexual maturation disorder. These people are anxious about revealing their true sexual identity. They often had negative experiences in the past where people walked out of them after unveiling the truth about their sexuality. Pretending as a person of the opposite sex or gender identity is a common theme throughout Catfish. The Internet gives the people behind the false profiles a chance to inhabit personas that they may not be comfortable with offline.
Low self-esteem can also be a reason for creating false identities. This mostly ties together with a fear for rejection. People who are not comfortable with the way they are in reality can create a profile where they shape their ideal self.

(8)
Further research has shown that people feel more comfortable with deceiving online instead of in reality. This is because the negative effects of lying are not as apparent online then in real-life. Emotions like guilt, shame or fear are far less present online which makes it less threatening. This makes the internet a safe “playground” to experiment with different aspects of the self. (3)
Angela, the woman in the documentary told she had nothing else in her life. She said that the more time she spent with Yaniv, the less time there was to deal with real life relationships. She knew she had to stop, but she kept going because she had nothing else to do. She feels really bad about all of it. (9)
Consequences/ implications
Deception seems hard to detect by social media users. For example, in a study of Internet fraud using page-jacking techniques (social jacking) even experienced users failed to detect inconsistencies, except for a select few who did detect deception showing that it is not impossible. Therefore, in social media a person’s ability to detect deception also depends to some extent on his or her Information Communication Technology (ICT) literacy. (10) Thus we could stop Catfishing if we let people know about the stereotypical acts of deceivers and increase their computer knowledge.
Another important part about Catfishing is the feeling of actual friendships. In todays world friendships are not well differentiated. In reality, our friends can be classified with different circles, like families, colleagues, high school classmates, and etc. Furthermore, even in the same friend circle, we may stay closer to some people than the others (11). Even though current Online Social Networks (OSN) services provide basic mechanism like friend list, which provides more flexibility than before, it is still hard to differentiate the tie strength and the friendship quality and intensity between users.