Hoax Blogs: Ethical or Unethical?

An issue that was discussed in the book was that of blogs which are narrative but at the same time fiction yet to the followers they are perceived as real. This following quote introduces this statement and I will further discuss in this blog how "tricking" the audience into believing one is a real cancer patient as in the Kaycee Nicole blog or a girl who has occult practices in the family as in the lonelygirl15 video blog, can be unethical and extremely unfair to the followers.

"Blogs that primarily tell the story of a life or lives, as confessional blogs do, also come with problems of their own, as when readers discover that a blog they have treated as the sincere narrative of a real person's experience is actually a fiction."(111)

Although the book does not go into detail as to whether this issue is ethical or unethical but it does mention in Chapter 5 that these hoaxes do anger the loyal followers who realize that their bloggers are in fact a hoax. The two cases that this book discussed was the Kaycee Nicole blog and the lonelygirl15 video blog on youtube. The Kaycee Nicole blog was about a high school girl who was fighting leukaemia. Her blog became very popular in a short amount of time and gained the attention of many students and adults alike who supported her immensely till the end of the hoax blog. The hoax blogger even went to the trouble to create another blog, that she claimed was her mother who wrote about how she dealt with having a daughter with leukaemia. When Kaycee died in 2001, her followers were devastated. The other hoax was a video blog on youtube acted by Jessica Rose, the actress who starred as Bree in lonelygirl15 which was apparently a film project. She claimed she was extremely lonely and that her family practiced the occult and they wanted her to be a part of a ritual. However, people realized it was a hoax and many people bashed her verbally about the "betrayal."

In my opinion, it really depends on the blog's content for one to decide it to be ethical or unethical. For example, the Kaycee Nicole blog I thought was quite offensive for it to be a hoax. This girl lied about having such a horrible disease and that just seems as though she is mocking it and not taking it seriously. She manipulated people's feelings and that can be very unethical in it's own way. There could have been parents of children who have leukaemia as followers, and just imagine how they would have felt to know that it was all a hoax. As for the lonelygirl15 video blog, I just thought it was stupid and not exactly unethical but also depend on who you ask. Devout followers of the blog were probably devastated while others wouldn't have cared at all. So, are hoax blogs ethical or unethical, well it depends on who how the blog can be deemed offensive if a fake, and the audience you ask.