Stardate 20030415.2307

(On Screen): Blog may have known sin. After what can only be thought of as a monumental fuckup by one blogger (and no, I don't care to go into details, and don't write and ask) a certain site stopped being updated, and there was serious fear that its author had become one of the last victims of Iraq's secret police and was probably dead. He'd been posting from Baghdad and had been rather frank in his criticism of the regime, words which we now know would have been more than enough to get him arrested and to face a terrible fate there. And so when he ceased to post, many of us feared the worst.

I still think that's probably what happened, but there may be an entirely different explanation, one of those "everything you think you know is wrong" kinds.

Any of my readers ever hear of Kaycee Nicole? It's doubtful that many of you have. This site contains a very complete history of a rather elaborate blogging hoax which went on for a couple of years. The short of it:

Kaycee Nicole was a very popular blogger, a teenager, young and beautiful but suffering from leukemia. Her site included details about her life, her treatment, her health ups-and-downs, and eventually her death. This was back when a lot of blogs amounted to online diaries. Hers was one of the most popular of that kind. When she died, a lot of people were deeply hurt, having come to know her and feel a great deal of affection for her.

On the other hand, there were certain people who had been skeptical about it all, mostly because she seemed like something out of a TV movie. Real patients with diseases like that aren't quite as chipper and optimistic as she always seemed to be; it was more like she was the idealized terminally-ill patient we all wish existed than like any real person ever actually was. Real patients in that situation get angry; they get depressed; they lash out; their spirits go up and down. Kaycee just seemed too good to be true, and as we all know, when something seems too good to be true...

Well, it turned out she was. Or rather, she wasn't. Kaycee Nicole never existed. The character was a complete fabrication. Such photographs as had been released of her were actually those of another young woman named Julie, who had been a local basketball star in the town where the hoaxer had lived and had been idolized by the hoaxer.

When we hear "hoax" we usually assume an intent to harm, and that doesn't seem to have been the case here. The best guess is that it was a rather odd mix of what's known as "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" and "Munchausen Syndrome by Internet", where the hoaxer (a woman named Debbie) actually created a fictitious child and made the child ill as a way of getting affection and attention online. In fact, Debbie also ran her own blog where she talked about how much she loved Kaycee and wrote her own posts about the life of her beloved fictitious daughter.

A few days after the "death" had been announced, a group of people on a group blog started using hints and clues and search engines and, in a rather impressive weekend's work, ended up proving the whole thing was a hoax. The identity (and full name) of the hoaxer was confirmed, but the piece of evidence that iced it was discovery of the true identity of the young woman whose pictures had been used for Kaycee, including a demonstration that she was still alive and was actually a college student. (Her picture was found online as a member of the Freshman basketball team at her university.)

But it has to be understood that while "Kaycee" was "still alive" that this went on without any really suspecting anything for a period of a couple of years, though a few grumbled about it. And during that time, a lot of people felt they came to know "Kaycee", from her blog and through active email correspondence and, in the case of at least one guy, via telephone conversations. At the beginning her friends all were aghast at the very idea, even the suggestion, that this dear sweet girl they'd grown to care about and whose death they had recently mourned, was anything other than genuine, and viciously condemned those who were trying to piece the truth together. But as the inconsistencies in the story began to stack up, they began to waver, and with the discovery of the real name behind the photographs it was pretty shattering to them (especially the guy who had actually spoken to "Kaycee" on the phone).

This isn't the first time that's happened, by the way. There was also a guy who created a woman and participated in both identities on the Anandtech forum (and eventually fabricated a death for her as a way of ending the game, only in her case it was a car accident). And this site was later admitted to have been created by a man.

The point of all this being that in each of these cases, there were real people who were taken in and who became champions for the idea that these fictitious online individuals were genuine people; character witnesses if you will. The motivation for the hoaxers in each case was different, ranging from simple curiosity, to a joke that got out of hand, to what was likely actually mental illness.

So I noticed somet