During the 2012 college football season, Manti Te’o had perhaps the most heartbreaking and inspirational story of all. A talented linebacker at Notre Dame, Te’o was the leader of the team, both vocally and through example, and his bone-crushing defensive play on the football field was leading the Notre Dame football team to greater heights. At the same time, many news outlets reported on the heart-wrenching story of Te’o’s girlfriend Lennay Kekua, who was battling Leukemia and died in a car-accident, and that Te’o drew inspiration for his remarkable season from Kekua, whom he had promised that he would play even if something had happened to her. This story captivated America, making many teary-eyed and contributing partly to Te’o finishing second in the Heisman trophy vote. The only problem? It was later found that Lennay Kekua never existed, and that Te’o had been catfished on the internet by a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who was in love with Manti Te’o. Manti Te’o quickly became the butt of jokes about being catfished and having fake girlfriends, unfortunately overshadowing his football prowess.
Being catfished is defined by the ever-reliable Urban Dictionary as “Having a relationship of any sort with someone on social media who isn’t who they say they are, by using someone else’s pictures or living a totally different lifestyle than what they told you.” These days, being catfished is a huge problem for dating sites, and with the rise of casual “hookup” apps such as tinder and hot or not, more and more internet users are falling victim to being catfished.
Tinder is one such “hookup” app. Currently the most downloaded dating app on both the Apple and Android app stores, Tinder is an app that uses the user’s current location to find potential matches from a radius of 1 to 100 miles depending on the user’s preference, and users look through a number of member profiles available in their radius, swiping left if the user finds the profile unattractive, and right if the user likes the profile/finds the profile attractive. If you swipe right to someone on tinder and he/she also swipes right, then you two will be “matches” and gain the ability to chat with one another. In theory, you will be able to get to know someone on tinder and if it all works out, to meet up with him/her, arranging all this through chat. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly easy to catfish people.
Tinder has been deluged with a flood of tinder users who use tinder to troll other unfortunate users who happened to match with them. In an article on the online newspaper The Daily Dot oh-so-creatively titled “The Fine Art of Trolling Horny Guys on Tinder”, a woman named Emily Miller would swipe right to a ton of guys on tinder, and message her matches a bunch of seductive messages implying that she wanted to “get it on.” Predictably, the guys would respond back attempting to take advantage of that offer, and she would end up unmatching them after getting their hopes up with false promises of getting laid.
Not only are there people who catfish on tinder and other dating sites/apps for sport, there are also those who do it for an emotional connection but feel the need to change their own identity. One notable example of this type of catfish is depicted in the 2010 documentary Catfish, in which a young man named Nev Schulman fell in love with a beautiful young woman over Facebook, only to discover that he had been falling for a middle-aged woman the entire time after some in-depth research. Oftentimes, these serious catfishes use fake pictures of attractive young people but also include some real information to draw their helpless victims in, causing a lot of emotional connection and then pain and distress when the victim figures out what is going on. Even worse is when the catfish cons you into giving him/her money or other possessions.
It turns out that some of the users on tinder aren’t even human. An article by the Huffington Post reported that multiple attendees at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas matched with an attractive “woman” named Ava on Tinder. After a highly philosophical conversation where she asked matches questions such as “What makes you human”, matches who “passed her test” were sent a link to her instagram, which consisted of a short clip from the film Ex Machina. It turns out the profile of “Ava” was actually a marketing stunt for the film Ex Machina, which tells the story of Ava, an eerily human robot. Fittingly, the tinder profile was that of Ava from the film, and the tinder users had been talking to a robot the entire time!
In recent years, smartphone dating apps such as Tinder and Hot or Not have become quite popular. Although they are “casual dating sites” and are supposedly very good for hook ups, catfishes, both casual and hardcore, run rampant, and the attractive young woman you are currently messaging on Tinder might even be a robot. All in all, online dating. Despite all the safeguards dating sites use to prevent catfishing, most notably Tinder requiring you to use your Facebook profile on the app, these safeguards on internet dating sites are so easy to circumvent. All you have to do is create a Facebook profile with pictures from Google images, and you’ll be swiping around in no time. All in all, online dating sites are not a viable way to date or hook up, as the likelihood of being catfished on these sites is far too big.
Sources:
http://www.dailydot.com/lol/how-to-lose-a-guy-in-one-tinder-interview/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2264053/Catfishing-The-phenomenon-Internet-scammers-fabricate-online-identities-entire-social-circles-trick-people-romantic-relationships.html
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