On social media, users can be whoever they want to be. On platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, users can hide behind avatars and pseudonyms and create completely different lives and personas. In short, people are able to catfish.
One Chinese vlogger’s catfishing backfired on her pretty publicly.
When social media platforms began gaining prominence, our parents started freaking out.
There was much fear about predators and people being able to hide behind a computer screen and pretend to be anyone they wanted to be.
Unfortunately, that has been the case at times.
There was even a whole MTV show called Catfish dedicated to people who get into online relationships with people who turn out to not be who they have presented themselves to be.
But it’s not often that someone is able to completely become a different person in front of a live camera.
This is all thanks to digital technology, like filters that can help change our appearances, often in quite subtle ways.
In fact, it’s pretty common for many of us to use selfie filters on Snapchat and Instagram.
Snapchat launched their ‘lenses’ in 2015, and they were super fun to try out.
Remember the dog filter and the rainbow tongue filters?
That was just the beginning. Soon, the social media platform would continue to increase and improve their filter options.
These filters are all fun and games, but as technology progresses, the more these filters can completely augment reality.
Recently, FaceApp launched a filter that shows what you might look like aged, and it was super creepy and freaky.
They seriously look too real!
However fun these apps may be, there have actually been some problems associated with them, due to their realism.
This happened to one person who used Snapchat’s gender-swapping filter that launched this past spring.
A man by the name of Ryan Hill thought it would be hilarious to prank his girlfriend into thinking he cheated on her.
He used the gender-swapping filter to give himself more feminine features and sent a snap to his girlfriend that read, “I have your bf’s t-shirt on.”
From first glance, it looks super realistic. And if he set the filter to play for only a few seconds, I can see why his girlfriend thought it was real.
But, yeah, you can how much these filters can really mess with one’s reality.
And if it can clearly seem harmless to someone you know and still harm them, imagine deceiving hundreds and thousands of dedicated followers.
Especially if they pay money and give virtual gifts to you.
This a real life situation that happened.
A Chinese vlogger was recently outed for deceiving her followers.
Qiao Biluo, better known as Your Highness Qiao Biluo on the Chinese Twitch-like streaming site Douyu, is known as a “cute goddess” and has racked up a lot of followers for her looks, 100,000 that is.
On July 25, Qiao Biluo was livestreaming with her pal.
She suddenly appeared to look a bit different than her usual youthful, fresh-faced appearance.
This is all because one of the filters that she uses on Douyu glitched and revealed her true identity.
Douyu functions sort of the same way as Snapchat — there are various built-in filters users can choose from while using the site.
She allegedly had no idea the filter had glitched until her followers started leaving the livestream.
It’s kind of a coincidence that the glitch happened, because just moments before it occurred, her followers were paying her thousands of dollars for her to remove the filter.
She isn’t the only party being criticized in the scandal — people are also criticizing those individuals who paid hundreds and thousands of dollars to someone they didn’t know.
It’s common in social media spaces like this in China for followers and viewers to give money to wanghong , or online celebrities.
So, to attract more followers and viewers, wanghong do wild things for extra attention.
They know that this will provide them better opportunity to be gifted money from “indoorsmen,” who can often feel important when they do so.
While many people dropped out of the vlogger’s livestream, her followers were reported to have grown from 50,000 to 673,000 in just a few hours.
According to China’s Global Times , Qiao Biluo may now be the face of advertisements for beauty cameras, and she announced that she hopes to launch a music album from all of this attention.
However, the vlogger may need to find a new platform for her future endeavors, because Douyu has reportedly shut down her account for.
This situation definitely brings to light issues of social media and viewer trust.
h/t LADBible and HITC
