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| Not a fake profile ... Aliya's unofficial fanpage has over 50,000 followers |
Have you seen the film Spartacus, the bit where the Romans try to get Spartacus to give himself up, but fail because there are so many people who claim to be him?
The gymnastics online community is getting a little bit like that ... I did some counting this morning on Facebook, having come across yet another online profile of a gymnast that claimed to be 'real' yet obviously wasn't :-)
22 online profiles of Aliya Mustafina
29 of Viktoria Komova
Some of these are athlete pages that present news of the gymnast's progress, but many are simply fake identities that make use of personal photographs found elsewhere on the internet to develop whole new narratives of the gymnast's life. I love my regular Gin O'Clock updates of HRH the Queen's daily life as much as the next person, but these profiles try to pretend to be the real Aliya or Vika, without the embellishment of humour or even a courtesy acknowledgement of the sources used. I don't think any harm is meant ... but I would feel violated if somebody else grabbed my private pictures and began to pretend they were an online version of me ...
Interestingly, though I thought there might be similar counts for other gymnasts, the vast majority of the 'fakes' seems to be on these two. Perhaps the English language speaking gymnasts have more opportunity to keep their identities private. I also think that these two - highly professional sports stars - deserve more official help in sensitively policing and promoting their online social media presence.
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