What an utter knob

Don Juan DeMagoo

Do you know sometimes I wonder about how stupid some people can be. I do hope the girl whose identity was hijacked presses charges. PhD student ..... what a Muppet. This will hurt any real person trying to speak out in affected areas in the future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/gay-girl-damascus-tom-macmaster

Gay Girl in Damascus hoaxer acted out of 'vanity'

Tom MacMaster, heterosexual American, contrite over fictional lesbian blogger 'Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari'

NIMAN

A knob on the internet ..... who would have believe it.:rolleyes:

reprazant

Hoax that all the papers fell for and are now attacking him out of sheer embarrassed of their stupidity.

This stuff happens all the time. It is just in this case, all the media fell for it. The media does not like being made look idiotic so the witchhunt will now begin.

Solair

What a very odd thing to have done!

hidinginthebush

He is an alpha troll, we must pay him respect!

MitchKoobski

The male American PhD student who confessed to being an internet hoaxer masquerading as a lesbian blogger in Damascus has spoken publicly about the reasons behind his deception, saying he was motivated, in part, by his own "vanity".
Gay activists in Syria and further afield have reacted furiously to the revelation that the blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, was written not by a 35-year-old woman kidnapped by security forces last week, but by Tom MacMaster, a married, 40-year-old American studying at Edinburgh University.
Speaking via Skype video to the Guardian, MacMaster, who is on holiday in Istanbul with his wife, expressed some contrition for the blog, which he began in February after constructing an elaborate web identity for Amina Abdallah Aral al Omari, a fictional lesbian Syrian, over more than four years.
He said: "I regret that a lot of people feel that I led them on. I regret that ... a number of people are seeing my hoax as distracting from real news, real stories about Syria and real concerns of real, actual, on-the-ground bloggers, where people will doubt their veracity."
Informed that Syria's official news agency, Sana, has leapt on the controversy, claiming the fictional blog had perpetuated "continuous fabrications and lies against Syria in term of kidnapping bloggers and activists", MacMaster said: "Yep. I regret that."
He had started the blog, he said, because he believed online posts about the Syrian and Israel-Palestinian situations would earn "some deference from obnoxious men" if written under an Arab woman's name rather than under his own, where "someone would immediately ask: why do you hate America? why do you hate freedom? This sort of thing."
He had made her a lesbian, he said, in an attempt "to develop my writing conversation skills ... It's a challenge. I liked the challenge.
"I also had the thing that I like to write, and my own vanity is ... if you want to compliment me, tell you like my writing ... That's how to make me happy."
But why had he exchanged many hundreds of emails with a woman in Canada, Sandra Bagaria, who believed herself to be having a romantic relationship with the blogger?
"I feel really guilty about that ... I got caught up in the moment and it seemed ... fun. And I feel a little like **** about that." He denied having been sexually excited by the interaction: "I don't want to go into that aspect particularly of it."
The student, who was later photographed by the Guardian at an address in Istanbul, confirming his location there, denied having ever met Jelena Lecic, a London woman whose photographs he appropriated from the internet and passed off as images of Amina.
"I found her photo on Facebook a while back and ... when I saw her photo, I was like, that is Amina ... So I just nabbed her photos and was using her."
During the course of his deception MacMaster masqueraded as "Amina" in direct communication with a number of news organisations, including the Guardian, whose correspondent in Syria had taken detailed steps, at some risk to the journalist, to meet the blogger. MacMaster had emailed the correspondent with a photograph, purportedly of Amina, which was in fact of Lecic.
Gay activists in Syria have reacted with fury to the revelation of the blogger's true identity and to the suggestion that MacMaster had written it in an attempt to help their cause.
"There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country," wrote Sami Hamwi, a pseudonym for the Damascus editor of GayMiddleEast.com. "We have to deal with [more] difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] activism. Add to that that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us."
MacMaster told the Guardian: "I am not happy about that. And I understand their concern ... I don't want to put anybody at risk, or increased risk. And in actual fact, some of my self-justification was that in having a completely fictional character being bold and forward, then it makes it easier for real people. Which is probably just a self-justification, but it was something that crossed my mind."
His post last Monday, in which he posed as a cousin of the blogger claiming she had been kidnapped by Syrian security services, "was, stupidly, my sort of 'away message'", written as he and his wife left for a holiday in Istanbul, he said.
MacMaster's wife, Britta Froelicher, is studying at the University of St Andrews for a PhD in Syrian economic development. He said she had not participated in the fiction. "She is a student of that region - Syria, specifically. She is extremely knowledgeable and obviously a great consultant for such a project. But I am the sole author."
Why was the going-away message "stupid"? "I wanted to shut down the whole blog for a while, and I was thinking I would phase out the character, and having her abducted was not the way to do it." He had intended, he said, to post in a few days that Amina "had been released, had left the country and was not going to blog any more".
As questions about the identity of the mysterious blogger became more acute in the days after her supposed abduction, a number of individuals and bloggers, among them journalists from the website Electronic Intifada (EI), traced internet leads that increasingly pointed to MacMaster.

Confronted by EI and by the Washington Post, MacMaster originally denied involvement, before admitting the hoax in a confessional post on the blog on Sunday. In that post, MacMaster said his intention had been in part to expose "the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal orientalism".
Wasn't there a very bitter irony, the Guardian asked, that a supposedly young Arab lesbian woman had been exposed as being the fictional creation of a heterosexual American man, and lacking an authentic voice of her own? MacMaster replied: "I am very aware the irony is 20 layers thick."
Did he accept that it was difficult to criticise the media for their coverage of the Middle East when he had lied explicitly to several news organisations? "Yeah, absolutely ... I don't feel incredibly happy with myself, you know. I wish in retrospect I would have done things very, very differently."

Quoting the article should be mandatory....

genericguy

a fake blog is hardly going to harm gay rights in generistan.

Don Juan DeMagoo

reprazant wrote: »

Hoax that all the papers fell for and are now attacking him out of sheer embarrassed of their stupidity.

This stuff happens all the time. It is just in this case, all the media fell for it. The media does not like being made look idiotic so the witchhunt will now begin.

All that you say is true, however I do hope the witch hunt is successful this time.
Partly because i felt pity for this fictitious character and partly because next time this happens for real none of the media will carry this story. Maybe also for stealing that woman's identity. Besides more importantly he seems like a plonker.

Don Juan DeMagoo

MitchKoobski wrote: »

Quoting the article should be mandatory....

Hey ho I reckoned if I quoted the entire post I would get a spanking for it being so long. Lesson learned, you may live to regret this though

Don Juan DeMagoo

genericguy wrote: »

a fake blog is hardly going to harm gay rights in generistan.

Never said it would. It is not gay rights I am annoyed about in particular, it is that any people that speak up because their human rights have been denied by a state in some isolated part of the world, will find it harder to get their message out because the media may be very skeptical.

Canis Lupus

Don Juan DeMagoo wrote: »

Never said it would. It is not gay rights I am annoyed about in particular, it is that any people that speak up because their human rights have been denied by a state in some isolated part of the world, will find it harder to get their message out because the media may be very skeptical.

The media should be very sceptical then they wouldn't get caught out by A Gay Troll in Edinburgh blog.

Robbo

Is this the first recorded incident of a male pretending to be female on the internet?

Guill

The he-she deserves 'Troll of the year' award.

conorhal

Jaysus, just like that time I went on a blind date to meet sexyLongLeggs69 the 23yr old legal secretary from London .....or Norman the 43yr old trucker from Hull as it turns out*, it' pays to be a wee bit sceptical when it comes to taking unverified internet sources at face value.
If journalists are to lazy to to follow the very basics of journalistic ethics, check your source before you publish then they deserve to look foolish.
This said, this eejit should be horsewhipped.








*PS Not really, I'm just lying on the internet to make my point seem more valid!

Mr. CooL ICE

LOL

:pac:

dubtom

reprazant wrote: »

Hoax that all the papers fell for and are now attacking him out of sheer embarrassed of their stupidity.

This stuff happens all the time. It is just in this case, all the media fell for it. The media does not like being made look idiotic so the witchhunt will now begin.

Media? what's it got to do with the media. He fooled ordinary people who read the blog.Do you think his intent was to get one up on the dailys:rolleyes:

Guill

But i thought that if was on the internet it must be true??

karma_

dubtom wrote: »

Media? what's it got to do with the media. He fooled ordinary people who read the blog.Do you think his intent was to get one up on the dailys:rolleyes:

What do you mean, what's it got to do with the media? Sure didn't they report it, all of them, including the guardian, without actually verifying if anything about it was authentic.

It's not rocket science.

Guill

karma_ wrote: »

What do you mean, what's it got to do with the media? Sure didn't they report it, all of them, including the guardian, without actually verifying if anything about it was authentic.

It's not rocket science.

This is!