Ljonny32@gmail, who are you?
An apology in the Star underscores the need for journalists to be diligent about fact-checking
It is a now well-established truth of our digital age that anyone can be anyone on the Internet.
Most of us do not dwell on the reality that we cannot know with all certainty who is at the other end of an email, a tweet or a Facebook post. People can lie about their identity and the potential for any one of us to be duped is considerable.
Journalists have long understood — as the Star’s journalistic standards manual states — that the Internet is a “minefield” and we must “proceed with caution.
“Identities must be scrupulously checked as the possibilities for mistaken identity are vast,” our guide states.
The Star fell short of this imperative recently when an intern reporter, working on her first story for the Star, was duped by what would seem to be a dishonest prankster. This person, communicating to the Star through the email address, ljonny32@gmail.com agreed to an email interview about using social media to find places for car sex in Toronto and then identified himself to the reporter with another man’s name.
The man whose name the hoaxer provided to the Star was, understandably, not amused. He believes his is a unique name in Toronto and he was shocked to see it published in the Star in a story about “hot spots” for car sex.
This unfortunate case of mistaken identity resulted in an embarrassing apology being published in the Star this week to make clear that Alex Shivraj — the name the email hoaxer gave to Star reporter Amal Ahmed Albaz — had never talked to the Star about finding places for car sex during his high school years in Mississauga or been sought for comment on the article.
In assessing what happened here, it seems to me there were red flags from the outset to indicate something could be amiss with the email source. A more experienced journalist may have been more skeptical and taken further steps to verify the source.
Unfortunately, the reporter did not alert her editors to these flags — as she should have. Had she done so, I expect they would have demanded she do much more to verify the identity of her source — as she should have.
Albaz had sought out “LJonny” on Reddit, a popular sharing website after noticing his comments in a “thread” about locations for “f-spots” in Toronto. He (or she, we don’t actually know) then responded with an email agreeing to be interviewed.
“Hey I’m cool with answering questions and providing insights to mine and my buddys’ collective experiences of finding good spots for your article,” LJonny32 said.
This source then requested that Albaz reference him as “butterz’, then added the ubiquitous (and annoying) “lol.”
She emailed back, saying, “I would have to reference you through your full name.” The source then responded with an email stating that his “full name” was “Alex Shivraj and that he was 28, “born and raised in Mississauga.
“I know my email says otherwise but I’ve learned to use a pseudo identity when dealing with the internet haha,” LJonny32, said in the email.
This source declined Albaz’s suggestion for a telephone interview: “Hey, I would rather do a q/a over text or email. I have a sore throat at the moment and it pains me to talk unfortunately.”
Albaz did not get a telephone number for her source. Nor did she ask him questions that might have been useful in verifying his identity — such as where he worked, where he went to high school, where he lives now.
She did go to Facebook to look up the name he provided. When she found an account for an Alex Shivraj in Mississauga, she assumed she had verified her source.
Of course, a Facebook page with the same name provides no evidence that that was the person she had communicated with through email. Albaz now understands this and knows she needed to take further steps to verify the source’s identity.
“It is my responsibility to be a diligent reporter and I take full responsibility for not going the extra mile to verify the information,” she said. “This incident has taught me a difficult lesson at the beginning of my career about how important it is to scrutinize every detail and double check as many facts as possible.
“It has come as a shock to me that someone would lie about their identity for a story in which they were willingly participating.”
The need for journalists to be skeptical of everything anyone tells them is by now a cliché (“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”). That’s never more so than in this digital age, when indeed, as a now iconic New Yorker cartoon depicting two canines at a computer tells us, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Speaking of which, we still do not know the identity of Ljonny32@gmail.com or know why he hoaxed the Star and misused the name of Alex Shivraj. Not surprisingly, this “source” has not returned my emails.
He or she could be anyone. publiced@thestar.ca