Last week, the Washington Post published a decades-old recording of Donald Trump catfishing a reporter, identifying himself as a publicist named “John Miller” and bragging about Trump’s—that is to say, his own—successes with women. How did the Post get access to the tape?
Last night on Twitter, Nev Schulman, the host of MTV's excruciating internet romance show Catfish, made a joke about Ray Rice, the NFL running back who has been banned by the league for knocking his wife unconscious. The joke was fucked up for many reasons, not the least of which is that Nev himself has a history of violence against women.
Nineteen-year-old Marissa Williams was spending too much time on Facebook, so her aunt decided to play a trick on her.
In-between prestige drama like The Americans and the perfection that is Nashville–which we'll be talking about tomorrow–tonight MTV's got the Catfish season premiere and True Life: I'm A Gay Athlete. Join us at over at Morning After as we learn the truth about some things and the lies about some other things.
Married actor Thomas Gibson of Dharma & Greg and Criminal Minds fame has allegedly spent the last two years engaging in an online relationship with a woman who used photos ripped from porn sites to convince the TV star to send her tawdry videos of himself.
Joe Sly is such a hardcore Boston punk. He's so punk, his email address is Bostonbeatgang@gmail.com. He's so punk that he proactively emails noise bands to see when and where they're coming to Boston to play some of those "DIY concerts." He's so punk his Google+ motto—this oxymoron just gets better—is "What's the point," his disaffection so deeply punk the statement doesn't even merit a question mark on his profile.
A history teacher at an all-boys Catholic school in Orange County was arrested over the weekend and charged with posing as a female on Facebook in order to convince underage boys to send him explicit photos of themselves.
I never want a boyfriend until I meet him; Charles* got me effortlessly. He enlivened me. I felt free to say whatever as we swapped pop-cultural obsessions, revealing ourselves in the process. Or at least, that was the idea. I told him I was nasty like the dirt under SWV singer Coko's fingernails. I meant it.
On last night's Catfish, the show that dares to ask who's zoomin' who about people who have never met but are engaged in Internet relationships, the zoomin' was particularly fervent. Rod met Ebony via a gay/bisexual dating site, even though he claimed not to identify as gay or bi ("You can go on there to meet basically anybody," he said, not adding that "anybody" meant primarily gay and bisexual people). He also claimed to be his cousin "KJ" and sent Ebony pictures of KJ rather than himself over the course of their four-year correspondence.
Anyone who has ever read Stephen Jay Gould or sat through an X-Men voiceover narration is familiar with the concept of punctuated equilibrium - the idea that evolutionary development happens not incrementally but in random, periodic bursts.
David "Dave on Wheels" Rose was just your average, 24-year-old, deaf quadriplegic with cerebral palsy who used an eye-tracking device to write inspirational quotes on Twitter.
Catfish was a documentary (allegedly) about the deception of an online relationship: it reminded us how easy it is to lie, to present a false version of yourself, and to find a connection with someone who doesn't exist.
Fried catfish is not exactly rare in New Orleans, but during Lent it's inescapable. On Lenten Fridays when good Christians abstain from meat, they settle for fish fries. ("Settle," as though any sane person would choose meat over fried catfish.)
Catfish is a pretty interesting documentary about a guy who found out that someone he was talking to on the Internet wasn't who he thought she was. (Gasp!) Now MTV is developing a pilot focused on "social network users who purposely misidentify themselves and the repercussions that occur." So, it's the MTV version of that famous New Yorker cartoon with the dog.
CBS just signed its second TV deal based on a Twitter account, and inked Ashton Kutcher to produce. Hollywood now officially has a monster crush on movies and TV serials about websites.
The new documentary Catfish, which follows a New York 20-something's strange relationship with online strangers, might seem to be about the cloak of anonymity provided by the Internet. It's not. It's about the new impossibility of being anonymous online.
He's done it! He's gone and done it. He edged out buzzed-about teen comedy Easy A, and handily trounced the latest project cooked up (in a producing, story-writing sense) by M. Night Shyamalan. The Cambridge boy comes home.
We should expect an epic, national-sized discussion when Catfish arrives in theaters, as it's destined to inspire a conversation that's been in the making for years, one we should've addressed awhile ago: the danger inherent in social networking.
