The story of the “GAA catfish” has seemed inescapable over recent weeks.
First revealed by The 2 Johnnies Podcast two years ago, the saga yielded a recent update on the alleged catfish that has attracted millions of listeners and has reportedly led to complaints being made to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The concept of the “catfish” is decades old: a person poses online as someone else and uses the images and identities of other people to deceive, often leading someone into a relationship.
In this case, the GAA catfish has reportedly targeted scores of people including GAA players, individuals in the entertainment industry and various Irish public figures.
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According to the two podcasters, Johnny ‘B’ O’Brien and Johnny “Smacks” McMahon, the person at the centre of the story has created numerous fake profiles and accounts that depict fictitious siblings, co-workers and friends, all in an effort to convince their targets that their online identity is authentic.
Well-known social media influencers in Ireland and Britain report that their images have been used in the deception.
But what are the responsibilities of the large social media companies whose platforms enable this behaviour?
What are the rights of those who find their identities have been used without their knowledge or of those who are targeted by the catfishing?
If anything, several social media owners have been moving away from concepts such as fact-checking and verification over the last couple of years.
Elon Musk abandoned Twitter’s old verification method of “blue ticks”, which was designed to establish the authenticity of an account.
The number of fake accounts on Musk’s rebranded X social network has since exploded. Anyone can attach a “blue tick” to their profile without having to establish their actual identity; it can now simply be purchased.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has abandoned third-party fact-checking in the United States, and the European Commission has demanded clarification on its intentions on this side of the Atlantic.
“You have a legal right to stop people pretending to be you, including by using your photograph, and you can go to a platform and have them remove the impersonating post or account,” says TJ McIntyre, associate law professor at University College Dublin’s Sutherland School of Law.
McIntyre says this raises the question, however, as to how good the online firms are at following through on requests to shut down fake accounts.
“Anecdotally, some such as Google are better than they were when it comes to misuse of personal information,” he says.
“However, we have also seen celebrities having their identities abused for scam advertising, particularly on Facebook, and those ads seem to pop up again and again even after the victims have complained and sought action.
“If you look at the overall trend with Meta at the moment – cutting back on fact-checking and moderation – that wouldn’t fill you with hope they are going to become more effective at protecting individual rights”.
For the unfortunate people who have found themselves either exploited or duped by catfishers, dealing directly with the social media platforms can be daunting. The very nature of the scam means many people can feel embarrassed or ashamed that they were taken in.
The Gaelic Players Association, the representative body for inter-county players, has not commented publicly on what is a sensitive issue – both for people contacted by the alleged catfisher and also for the individual involved.
It is understood the GPA did contact members last week to make them aware of the situation and to point to the support it has in place for them.
According to Simon McGarr, Dublin solicitor and managing director of Data Compliance Europe, there are “pathways” for people seeking to have fake accounts taken down, but there are no guarantees that social media companies will move quickly to do so.
“Fake profiles – where someone is pretending to be another actual person – can be very damaging to the real person,” he says.
“In that instance you have data protection rights and you can contact the data protection officer of the various social media groups for redress or takedown of the fake profiles. But be aware that you get various speeds of reactions depending on the internal culture of the organisation you are dealing with.”
Just because an Instagram “influencer” freely shares their images online, that doesn’t give “free rein” for that image to be used by somebody else however they want, he says.
In these cases, the social media companies are obliged to remove the offending account but only if it has been brought to their attention.
“The social media platform is given a sort of conduit defence – it is not like a newspaper publishing things – but once a social media company is made aware of something wrongful, then within a reasonable amount of time they must take action on it; if not, then wrongdoing would be attached to them”.
Much of the activity by the alleged GAA catfish has been done on Meta’s Instagram platform. It is there that the fake profile pictures and the network of bogus contacts have been sourced and manufactured.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the case or catfishing in general.
The company’s official policy is to remove accounts that impersonate other people – and as of now it still employs a team of reviewers to implement its “community guidelines”.
The whole area of verification is now a large battleground between the social media platforms and regulators in Brussels.
Last summer, the European Commission found that X’s new “blue-tick” policy was “deceptive”, saying there was “evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users”.
Efforts to tighten up online safety increased at a European level with the arrival into force of the Digital Services Act in November 2022.
The commission has deployed the Act against Meta, saying it is concerned with the standards that Meta applies to its verification methods.
It is also under the terms of the Act that the commission is seeking access to internal documents held by X in its investigation into content moderation at Musk’s social media operation.
“Until recently this area was all very self-regulatory and relied on self-policing and voluntary codes of conduct, but the DSA changed that,” says Liz Carolan, who writes extensively about the relationships between politics and technology.
“Now these companies have legal obligations to look for systemic risks; they aren’t focused around individual instances of people using their platforms for harmful behaviours. It is very hard to hold a platform liable for what people do on it,” she says.
“You need regulators to put various individual complaints together and identify patterns where the social media companies have failed and to examine whether they have put systems in place to prevent that.”
The tussle between Europe and the US tech firms has become overtly politicised.
Meta chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg – now firmly aligned with Donald Trump’s new administration – has accused the commission of using fines against US tech companies as a way to hobble their progress and has compared them to tariffs.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American businesses,” he said at the turn of the year.
He has accused the EU of “censorship”.
Similar language has been used by Musk.
As the high politics around the regulation of the social media giants becomes more complex, ordinary users of these platforms must use good judgment and apply much scrutiny when encountering any unfamiliar profiles.
Against the backdrop of more fractious relations between social media giants and their regulators, the phenomenon of catfishing will continue, leaving it up to social media users themselves to ensure the companies hosting these deceptions live up to their obligations.
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