Marin Magazine - February 2018

sham connection. Most commonly operating on social media and dating apps like Tinder, catfishers make up life stories and job histories and pirate others’ photos to perpetuate the charade. Their motives range from boredom, loneliness, curiosity and revenge. The phenomenon has spawned a television show (MTV’s Catfish) and been referenced in episodes of series like Law & Order: SVU. About a dozen states, including California, now have laws that address catfishing and give victims legal recourse to seek monetary damages.

You can reduce your chances of being catfished by watching for red flags like continuity problems in someone’s story or a reluctance to meet up, but the reality is it’s easy to lie and misrepresent yourself online. Privacy is at risk, too, since most of us readily upload information about our lives to the cloud — likes, interests, videos, photos of ourselves clothed or nude. Apps like Snapchat, while inherently ephemeral since exchanges aren’t stored, don’t stop people from screenshotting pictures or texts. As a result, the lure of social-media theft has never been higher. The service Ashley Madison, marketed to people who are already married or in relationships, capitalized on the infidelity urge and the internet’s ability to fulfill it (“Life is short. Have an affair”) until it was infamously hacked (and all user data released) in 2015.

Chat features on everything from Instagram
and Twitter to the seemingly innocuous Words
With Friends are prime locations for sparking
up new relationships; in fact, there’s a term for it
— sliding into DMs (direct messages). A 2017 Men’s
Fitness story explains “how to slide into her DMs,”
calling them “an undisputed fire-starter of the
digital age.” In the 2016 song “Down in the DM,”
Memphis rapper Yo Gotti details an addiction to
Instagram and requesting nude photos on the app;
the song has had over 115 million plays on Spotify.

Along with this new digital landscape has come a rise in partner anxiety, distrust, and cottage industries that track our significant others’ actions online. Some people use revenge porn — sharing sexually explicit photos and videos without the other person’s consent — to blackmail or coerce a current or former lover or punish one who’s broken things off. The practice is outlawed in countries like Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom and the majority of the United States. Capturing compromising images can be as simple as taking screenshots or as involved as using keylogging spy apps; a quick Google search yields numerous hits for software that can access deleted data off a monitored device in addition to phone logs, social media activity and location history, all for a nominal fee.

Prior to Facebook, sites like MySpace and chat rooms made it easy to meet strangers online — just look at Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in an “over-30s” chat room in You’ve Got Mail. With the demise of these forums, many people have taken to dating apps not for dating, but for just talking — face-to-face is ideal, but digital is more convenient. A survey by Abodo of 3,500 college students published on Mashable found that only 4 percent preferred to meet people through dating apps, while 80 percent still liked to meet via mutual friends or shared interests. Even 34 percent of those on Tinder said it was mostly for entertainment, also the top motivation of Bumble and Grindr users.

To provide this more generalized connection, some matchmaking apps are branching beyond dating. Bumble now features offshoots Bumble Bizz, for finding mentors, networking and career opportunities, and BumbleBFF, geared solely to making friends. Tinder has launched Vina, also for finding friends. The internet has become our public space, the new town square — it’s up to us to figure out the best way to use it. m