Kate ([info]x_mass) wrote,
@ 2009-06-20 05:08:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
please read - as words fail me
http://community.livejournal.com/transnews/1151211.html?style=mine

(2 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]auntyjen
2009-06-20 10:14 pm UTC (link)
seems like it was a hoax
i don't know how someone could do that

(Reply to this)


[info]baratron
2009-06-23 12:03 am UTC (link)
It sounds like a classic case of Fake Internet Death. Too many details are completely off just in what has been mentioned on the thread. Apparently this girl was a brilliant dancer bound for Juilliard; her parents were involved in a serious car accident about a month ago, her father died and her mother lost an arm; while she herself was murdered in a horrendous way, and despite only having been killed the night before, somehow the internet poster knew extreme details of how she died that would normally only be revealed over several weeks' work by trained pathologists, forensic scientists and detectives.

People who fake their deaths on the internet for attention start by faking smaller things. First of all they exaggerate their own positive achievements, then when that receives some attention, they move onto exaggerate bad things that happen to them. Then they make up tragedies, and finally post about their own deaths. They may well set up one or more sockpuppet accounts prior to their "death", where they pretend to be a friend of themselves, so that the community will believe posts made by that account.

I encountered several fake internet deaths and another internet fraud within a rather short period of time, and wrote up 4 of the cases at [info]internetfraud. I do actually have all the information for another couple more, but I lost the will to keep writing on the subject. Maybe I should.

Some people make up dramatic horrible lives and fake deaths to wind people up; but my overriding impression is that a lot of them do it because there is something missing in their lives and/or they are mentally ill. I tend to feel that the gratuitous online liars need pity and help, but it's difficult to forgive someone after you've spent a lot of emotional energy on them, especially as you can never know when to believe them again. Quite a few of them crawl back into the same or a related community, so it's worth forum administrators being aware of their members' IP addresses.

It's true that a lot of transsexuals have rather awful lives due to prejudice, and often suffer more violence than a cis-gendered person of the same age living in the same place. However, some people simply have TOO much tragedy to be real. Too many major, dramatic bad things happening rather than the lower-grade but continuous chronic crap. If you read a person's story over several months or years, there might come a point where it starts to ring false. At that point, if you don't know someone in the walking-around part of life (to me, online is real), it's always worth checking past livejournal or forum posts, just to make sure.

And it makes me so pissed off that people do this :/ But I'm not sure that all of them are sane enough to understand what they're doing to others.

(Reply to this)

(2 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…