Beowabbit

Sorry for the somewhat behind-the-curve post about this; it didn’t occur to me at the time the story broke to post a correction, and by the time it did I presumed it was too late to be worthwhile, but a message from kw_leigh changed my mind. (Thanks!)

( Cut for the benefit of those of you who are already familiar with the story. )

Something that makes this story even creepier is that “Amina” got technical assistance setting up A Gay Girl in Damascus, and a lot of exposure, from Paula Brooks, the blogger behind LezGetReal. In the aftermath of the exposure of the hoax, in which a post on LezGetReal apologized for having been duped by Amina, “Paula Brooks” was exposed as another straight man pretending to be a lesbian, Bill Graber.

And of course real activists in Syria are abducted (and sometimes tortured and killed), but this sock puppet got lots more attention that real people, and (at least according to Egyptian Chronicles; I haven’t run across other sources) the Assad regime predictably used this hoax to try to undermine the credibility of real stories of government repression.