The Dangerous Act of Catfishing

Claim: Social Media has evolved the dangerous act of catfishing

            The term catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romance according to urban dictionary. By being able to disguise who you really are, has become quite dangerous when you go to meet your “lover” in person and they aren’t who they said they were.

            MTV has come out with a new show called Catfish exposing those who do create fake identities. This show is very interesting to me because there are so many twists and turns. Sometimes they are really the person they say are, and other times they are psychos that have made up elaborate lies in order for self-entertainment. When the relationship is true with no lies, and the do finally meet each other most of the time its love at first sight. On the other hand, there are some big lies that happen. These people go to an extreme of making up sometimes over 10 fake Facebook people in order to keep their story going and realistic. This show just shows how dangerous online relationships can be. You truly don’t know who is on the other end of the conversation. Although some of these relationships do work, I still don’t think it’s a very good idea to search for your soul mate online. But if that’s your thing, just be cautious. For me if I’m on Facebook and a random person chats me, I always keep in the back of my mind… “This could be a 60 year old pedophile I’m talking to.”

            With the help of MTV people are able to safely meet who is on the other end of the computer screen. So when they go to meet them if it does turn out to be sketchy they have someone to back them up. There have been so many stories of people getting taken or worse killed because they went to meet their “soul mate.” There are many things that can go wrong when meeting someone for the first time after establishing a relationship online.

            Social network has brought along this dangerous act of catfishing. Before things like facebook and other social networks were established there was no meeting strangers online. But now that social networks have been established there is a strong need for people to be cautious about what they say and who they talk to online.

            Parents can be a big part of keeping kids safe from catfishing. If they regulate what age they can have things like facebook I feel like there will be less problems. There isn’t a magic number for the age you can be on facebook, it’s more a maturity level. If it’s obvious that the kid is immature and maybe has low self-esteem they may be pinned for the type a catfish could take advantage of.

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