Catfishing – just a harmless bit of fun or a crime? – Gurjeevan Kalha, GNSA

It’s January 2022. Basant Khaled, a 17-year-old from Egypt, died by suicide after she was blackmailed with photoshopped pictures online. Devasted, Basant left a handwritten letter to her family saying “Mom, believe me, the girl in those pictures is not me. These pictures were photoshopped. I swear! I’m a young girl, mom, and I don’t deserve all that’s happening to me. I’m suffering from depression, and I feel like I’m suffocating. I’m really tired. It’s not me, you raised me well.” Matt Peacocks’ family has been put under tremendous strain. His wife has been contacted on many occasions and wrongly told that her husband was cheating on her by asking girls and women for sexual photographs and videos.

Matt got so frustrated that he contacted private detective Rebecca Jane Sutton in Manchester for help. Within 48 hours, they tracked down and met the catfish, who admitted using Matt’s identity to deceive dozens of women. Matt has expressed his disappointment when the police said that no crime had been committed: “It affected me and my whole family. We spoke to one girl who the ‘catfisher’ had targeted, pretending to be me. She told me she had felt like committing suicide after being deceived by this man. Suicide occurred in both scenarios. Is Catfishing to fit your own pleasures really worth someone’s sacred life?

The Liquify filter lets you push, pull, rotate, reflect, pucker, and bloat any area of an image. The distortions you create can be subtle or drastic, which makes the Liquify command a powerful tool for retouching images as well as creating artistic effects. Use the Smudge tool to gently reshape important edges into more appealing and softer lines. Face tune and snapchat filters completely alter someone’s appearance to the point where they are unrecognisable. Why do they do this? Now you might say that photoshop allows people to feel happy on social media. The images they create with such programmes are enhanced versions of themselves and that it is not catfishing. Insecurities. Mental illness. Hide their identity. Revenge. Harassment. Exploring sexual preference.

Catfish can be motivated by a phenomenon called the “online disinhibition effect,” where online anonymity makes people less likely to adhere to the moral codes they use in real life. Lying repeatedly can change the brain gradually, too. “We learn to lie over time by the way it rewards or punishes us,” neuropsychologist Dr. Sanam Hafeez Ph.D. tells us. Researchers have also found that the part of the brain, the amygdala, that would otherwise send out guilt signals, stops responding when a liar becomes a natural at deceiving. That means they don’t feel discomfort about lying, whether they get caught or not. But these are no excuses for Catfishing. Exposure to altered images can lead to body: dysmorphic disorder. Narrowing waists or misrepresenting skin tones can harm people’s self-esteem and cause issues. For people who have been fooled by catfishers or scam artists, one of the greatest problems can be the sense of shame or humiliation associated with having been tricked. Anyone who has been fooled in this way is likely to have to deal with complex feelings of hurt and shame. It can be difficult for them to trust again. Racism, body dysmorphia, eating disorders are all caused by catfishing. I’m not saying this to ban photoshop. I’m not saying this to ban facetune or snapchat filters. Instead take this as a warning to stay safe on the internet and remember how deceiving it can be.

Approximately 4,479,300,000 people in the world use the internet. Don’t be one of the 28% have been contacted in a way that left them feeling harassed or uncomfortable.