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

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

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.