COMM 203 Blog # 2 - Manti Te'O and The Case of the Invisible Girlfriend

It is very easy to trick people using the internet. So many stories could be fabricated and believed to be true. These stories can be fabricated through many means. This story is the perfect example. Most famous people would not lie about having a fake girlfriend but with the internet it makes the lie more believable. If we didn't have the internet Manti Te'O maybe wouldn't lie about such a thing. Not only football players do this sort of thing. In online gaming many gamers disguise their gender and they end up "dating" someone else playing that game. Little do the people dating them know that they are of a different gender. Some gamers do this gender swapping for several reasons. The most common reason is to get free items in the online game. It is scary to talk to someone on the internet without knowing if they are real or night. Dating websites become dangerous in this aspect. When someone goes to meet a person they are talking to on a dating website that person could turn out to be not what you expected. They could be a criminal, a rapist, or a killer. A perfect example is the Craigslist killer. Being someone else on the internet is easy and it's scary to think about sometimes. Each time someone puts personal information on the internet they may get worried that some random person online may use that information to harm them. A good simulator of this is takethislolipop.com is a good replication of what someone could do with simple information someone puts online. It shows that a crazy person could travel all they way to someone's home and harm them. When it comes to the internet people should be proceed with caution and not believe everything they see or read.