Columnist argues that perhaps regulation is needed for social media
The Issue: Catfishing, or the act of creating fake online profiles, has caused problems for countless individuals
Internet relationships have been some of the most interesting developments of the computer age. The ability to easily create an entire community of people with like-minded interests without the necessity of a building or specific time and space parameters has allowed for vastly expedited exchanges of information.
Internet dating sites act on a similar principle. Someone, understanding that people are seeking partners but either don’t know how to go about it or haven’t been successful, decided there was a perfectly profitable solution to all of that.
Services selling subscriptions promising love due to calculated algorithms are enticing, so people readily fork over their most intimate information and blindly trust the responses they receive. They trust it because it’s on the Internet, and if it weren’t legal or true it wouldn’t be there, right?
As more and more stories come out of the woodwork about people creating fraudulent accounts and tricking others into relationships, or “catfishing,” it looks like these websites aren’t being as heavily regulated as consumers believed them to be.
When it comes down to it, the Internet is the modern-day version of hitchhiking. Asking strangers for books, clothes, information or a relationship is about the same as asking a stranger for a ride.
The only difference now is that people assume there’s regulation and policing because of the safeguards websites make you go through before you can use them, for example: submitting your email, credit card information or pictures. But with all of the information on the Web, safeguards can be easily fabricated.
When stories like the Manti Te’o hoax start becoming more and more frequent, maybe it’s time to call on the websites for further regulation.
If more secure requests are required to create a profile on a dating website, then one person wouldn’t be able to make multiple or fake accounts.
Of course there are possibilities of hacks to those websites, which could cause huge breaches of security and identity thefts, but it could also put a stop to things like Craigslist killers and the public humiliation people face more and more often when they find out who the real correspondents are.
Ultimately, people should stop implicitly trusting these websites just because they’re on the Internet. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to trust everything you see online?
More Like This
Column: Dating not a good way to find a partner
By Grace Batton | Feb. 29, 2016