I’m talking about the case of the Damascusgaygirl blog. Its much-viewed missives purporting to be from the Syrian frontline netted 850,000 internet hits at their height. When it looked as if Amina, the girl in question, had been kidnapped, her case was discussed on Newsnight with a panel of eminent experts moderated by Jeremy Paxman. Then, last week, it was revealed that behind the whole enterprise was Tom McMaster, a married 40-year-old postgraduate student in Edinburgh of American extraction.
The story is fascinating, with implications about privacy and trust. It’s also interesting to see how the whole thing has been covered by other media, which are all inter-connected these days. This is a story that seems to have captured imaginations beyond the difficult-to-define limits of the blogosphere, which is all too often criticised for being insular. The arch-traditional Daily Mail has gone big on it on its thoroughly modern website with a headline “‘Woman’ who posted Gay Girl in Damascus blog comments on lesbian website exposed as retired construction worker from Ohio.” In an age where everyone wants to come at the top of Google searches, headlines are now increasingly literal. Gone are the days of “Gotcha”. Punning witticisms do not work well online. A further by-product of the unmasking was that it got me interviewed on Channel 4 News by Jon Snow.
Perhaps all this digital impersonation is more widespread than one might think: it’s socially undesirable and often undetectable behaviour that doesn’t normally announce itself. Blogs come and go – they are in some ways audience-led. This one, because of its timing, ended up with hits “to die for”, which proved irresistible to its creator. Many others are just people ranting away to themselves on the web: they are the revenge of the callers to radio phone-ins, who can now have the microphone for themselves.
Jon Snow asked if bloggers should adopt the same journalistic standards as the press. Granted, there is the Press Complaints Commission, but let’s not kid ourselves that the print media have always been paragons of veracity. Only the other week, a Sunday Times issued a hasty apology to John Prescott over a “production error” which wrongly quoted him expressing dissatisfaction with Labour leader Ed Miliband. By constantly adding hyperlinks to corroborate evidence, bloggers actually operate by higher standards than Fleet Street (or whatever the 21st century equivalent of the street of shame is). The Prescott-Sunday Times climb-down occurred after the former Deputy Prime Minister tweeted the falsehood to 60,000 followers – here mainstream media were held to account by the Twittersphere.
What are the implications of the affair? What I omitted to say under the glare of the studio lights was that on the web no one has the last word. Tom McMaster has not only had his university mail account frozen, but will never live this down. This complete idiocy will stay online forever: incarcerated by internet. Those who live by the blog die by the blog. His digital footprint will outlast the story. For bloggers to (re)gain trust and credibility they should cite sources, be truthful, take part in the offline real life community events that networks of blogs can generate. The analogy that did spring to mind on air was that of Milli Vanilli – the 1980s pop duo of good-looking lithe black guys with dreadlocks whose album was actually the work of a middle-aged and rotund German record producer. In short, impersonation is not a new phenomenon. But the world of blogs takes it into a digital dimension. Reader beware.
