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Following the BethAnn McLaughlin and Jessica Krug revelations, Rachel Moss offers her tips for spotting online fakers
In late July, the academic Twitter community was rocked by the tragic death of an Arizona State University professor who went by the alias @sciencing_bi. She had reportedly died from Covid-19 after being forced to teach in-person well into spring.
Only days later, it was revealedthat @sciencing_bi – who had, over several years, posted regularly about the trials of being an LGBTQ woman of colour – was actually a fictitious persona (or, in internet terms, a sock puppet) of neuroscientist BethAnn McLaughlin, founder of the #MeTooSTEM movement.
That strange story did not make many waves beyond academic Twitter. Only a month later, however, a much bigger story of deceit hit international news sites. Jessica Krug, associate professor of history at George Washington University, posted an online blog confessingthat for many years she had pretended to be black. In addition, it became clear that she had also posed as an Afro-Puerto Rican activist in New York.
McLaughlin’s motivation seems to have been to claim she had a Hopi friend, perhaps as a means of bolstering her social justice credentials, while Krug’s academic career certainly benefited from her performance of blackface: she received financial support from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for her book