That is my jam!

The dupefication of online fan bases.

It's been a busy week in the outing of social networking phenoms.

Brody Ruckus, of the infamous "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome" Facebook group, is fake.

Turns out "Brody" and the girls he posted pictures of are models. And the "Ruckus" may ring a bell if you go to Georgia Tech - the masterminds of Ruckus Music (GT's new partner for downloading music) created Brody and the group. Facebook deleted the group and removed the account because it violated the TOS. It's pretty interesting on the heels of the announcement that they're going to open up Facebook to the public. How many Brody Ruckuses will there be in the future that they can't track down? I wonder if they'll have the manpower to monitor these things.

lonelygirl15, the innocent homeschooled girl who became one of the most popular people on YouTube, is fake.

The girl who plays "Bree" is an aspiring actress from New Zealand. Someone uncovered her cached MySpace page and a set of pictures being not so lonely. A lot of people have been claiming for a while that it wasn't real, mainly because of the great editing, the implausibility of Bree's parents letting her friend Daniel hang out in her room all the time, and the domain lonelygirl15 being registered a month before her first video was posted on YouTube. There seems to be a mixture of backlash ("I'm never watching again since you're fake"), disbelief ("the girl in the pictures obviously isn't Bree"), and continued loyalty to lonelygirl ("this is way more entertaining than any show on TV right now"). The creators and actors did an interview with MTV, and the backdrop had the Revver logo, so it seems as if they'll be migrating from YouTube to their own site (lonelygirl15.com) and profiting off of video views. We'll see if this migration is successful - since the YouTube community, video responses and all, was what made the story so successful in the first place.

posted by annie @ 4:40 PM