Spotting an impostor

Regardless of what MySpace is worth, there are issues with the social network. A few days ago, a friend linked me to Keith Hernandez's MySpace profile. Hernandez is a former baseball player and current broadcaster for Sports New York (SNY). I opened the link, interested in the fact that he had a profile, when I saw that it was clearly a fake. Hernandez would not use this as his profile quote: "I'm not gonna say women belong in the kitchen but they certainly don't belong in the dugout!"

MySpace is littered with fake celebrity profiles. If you look at Hernandez's friends, you'll find some of his colleagues (Gary Cohen and Chris Cotter) and former teammates (Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden), none of which are profiles that are actually managed by those people.

In August, Jessica E. Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article (courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) on the fake pages and the efforts of two men who are trying to verify the true celebrity pages. She writes about the problem that fake celebrity pages presents:

"The proliferation of celebrity posers frustrates the many MySpace members who use the site to follow news about -- and send fan mail to -- pop icons and other prominent personalities who join for cheap publicity."

This is the main reason that some people will never take the Internet seriously. How can anyone ever be sure they're reading the truth when it is so easy to falsify things such as celebrity profiles?

Granted, I found some of the things posted funny, but overall I think these pages are useless and have no business being in existence. It also makes me believe that a) many people have nothing better to do than post fake pages and b) some people's lives are so uninteresting, that they are forced to live vicariously through someone else's life.