#+TITLE: Virtual Fiancé?
#+SETUPFILE: ../../theme_lev1.setup

“Okay Nina, you know you can have your Facebook account, but you have to
give me your login and password because I want to be able to have access
and check that nobody takes advantage of you.” 

Jean was talking to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nina who, like all her peers, believed it was
essential to have at least one social account.

“But Daddy I’m embarrassed, I don’t want you to come in and read my
chats!”

“Believe me Nina I don’t want to read your chats either! It embarrasses
me as much as it embarrasses you! But I have to be able to protect you
if necessary, it’s full of dangerous people out there, they may pretend
to be someone else and then take advantage of you!”

“Mhhh… but you have to promise me not to go read my things and to
access only in my presence!”

“But this is not possible! It may be necessary for me to log in when you
are away!”

“Then no deal!”

“Then no social!”

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A few hours and many negotiations later Jean and Nina finally reached
an agreement. Now they were together in front of the computer, the girl
typed in her email, password, and entered Taylor Swift’s profile.

“Ah, is this the name you use on Facebook?”

“Of course, Daddy, do you think I would use my real name? It’s lame!”

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Jean took a quick look at her friends: Shawn Mendes, John Holland,
Crystal Cyrus, Perrie Edwards, Selena Gomez… Jean was not very
familiar with the teen idols scene but he recognized some names and he
was beginning to understand, especially from the photos that Nina
published: that girl was certainly not her.

Suddenly “Ding!” A notification and the chat window appeared at the
bottom of the page: Justin Bieber. Nina blushed: “Daddy, just go away
now.”

“No wait, I want to see more!”

“No dad, leave me alone, I have to chat with Justin, come on! If I don’t
answer right away, maybe he’ll leave the chat!”

“And who is this Justin?”

“He is my fiancé! But don’t worry! We’ve never met! He’s my virtual
boyfriend, see? Each of us has a fake identity, we are who we would like
to be, I want to be Taylor Swift and now I am engaged to Justin Bieber.
Come on, he promised to take me shopping today, leave me alone!”

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Not convinced at all, Jean left the room to leave his daughter to her
privacy, but promised himself to better understand this story of the
fake profiles… it sounded really bad. Who was really behind that
virtual little friend?

Nina, together with many boys and girls of her age, had created a world
of parallel identities on Facebook. A game where they had built their
reality: they got engaged, married, have jobs, go to dinner together or
to the cinema or go shopping but always inside the social network. It
was a real world simulation game where the girl from the suburb could
imagine herself as a rich heiress hanging out with the most famous stars
of the moment.

Nina, /alias/ Taylor Swift, had been engaged for a few weeks with Justin
Bieber. They chatted for hours telling each other about their imaginary
days and planning their life, they had decided to go to live together in
his loft in London; he had given her an engagement ring that stood out
gloriously in her timeline enriched by many likes and hearts. Not to
mention the complimentary comments from their entire network of rich and
famous friends.

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Jean was struggling to understand, he had talked about it with Nina’s
mother: “Be cool Jean,” she said, “It’s just a game between kids… and
anyway… what is all this caring now? You even don’t live with us!” So
according to Martha Nina wasn’t in danger at all, however Jean could not
relax but he had promised Nina not to read her chat…

One day while picking up Ruth, the youngest daughter, to bring her to
skate class, Jean met Nina who was running out, on her lips a shadow
of lipstick, make up on her eyes…

“Hey, how come the hurry! Where are you going, girl?”

“I have a date, Justin and I finally decided to meet, I’m late, I’m
late!!” The girl shouted disappearing down the stairs. Jean gaped at
Martha who was waiting for him in the doorway with little Ruth.

“But what…” Jean said in amazement, “but do you let her go out with
someone she only met on Facebook? Are you crazy? What if he is an adult
man? A maniac? A rapist? A pedophile?”

“You worry too much Jean. Listen, I trust our daughter, she’s not
clueless, I told her to meet him in a public place and to leave and call
us if she feels uncomfortable, however at 8pm she will be home again.”

“Okay, okay… but at eight o’clock, as soon as she comes home, she
must call me otherwise I’ll go looking for her! I will enter her profile
and read the chat with this pervert and go looking for her!”

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It seemed like endless hours but at 8pm in the evening the phone finally
rang: “Hi dad,”

“Nina! Everything good? Are you OK?”

“Sure dad… mom says I had to call you…”

“Did this Justin Bieber do well? What did he do to you? What happened?”

“Nothing dad, we went to eat ice cream, we chatted a lot, Louise is
toooo nice!”

“Louise?”

“Yes, Louise, she is Justin Bieber, look dad, we get along really well!
She is in third high school, like me, but she lives in Southend, she is
she’s really nice, we have the same tastes in everything, she says that
at school she doesn’t have many friends because they tease her because
she dresses like a boy, even if she doesn’t like males at all, but she
has the same hair as Justin Bieber, exactly! Next week we will go to the
cinema to see the film about Justin…” Nina was a flow of words, she
couldn’t stop talking about her new friend…

Louise, 16 years old…

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“How beautiful are these kids,” Jean thought. And he felt a little
proud… that daughter of him was just growing up well.

* Understand
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: understand
  :END:

Nina and her friends invent a way to play on Facebook without
necessarily having to submit to its identity rules. They take advantage
of the /filter bubble/ to create a virtual world inside which to play
roles and invent games that are not gamified.

Since the eighties of the twentieth century there have been numerous
platforms that allow role-playing in virtual worlds. Some of these
platforms, as for example the legendary /LambdaMoo/, are in text-only format.
Others, such as the even more famous /Second Life/, are graphic. These
are parallel worlds built by the users themselves.

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In the Zero and Ten years of the new millennium, the habit of using
platforms of this type was increasingly lost to flow onto gamified
platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok where the experience is
already designed by the platform developers.

In this beautiful story, our young friends have sought a way to bend a
proprietary platform to their imagination.

* The Social Media Manager Says...
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: the-social-media-manager-says
  :END:

It is increasingly difficult to have a fake identity on Facebook which,
often upon reporting by other users, asks for an identity document to
verify that the name we use on the social network corresponds to our
personal name.

Legally speaking, Facebook has no right to ask for documents and in fact
takes care to say that we can safely delete sensitive data from the
document before sending it to the staff. 

In the FAQ, the Facebook team also explains that in case of need to remain anonymous (in case of being
persecuted by someone reported as a stalker, or in similar situations of
risk for personal safety) it will be possible to use a nickname instead
of your personal name, which will still be communicated to the staff.

* The Hacker Says...
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: the-hacker-says
  :END:

You can edit your ID using a graphics program, such as free GIMP
software for Linux. Since Facebook does not have the right to ask us for
documents and we do not have to send sensitive data, we can safely
obscure the identity card number, the photo, the date of birth, the
municipality of residence, and change our name and surname as we wish
since at this point it will not even be an official document anymore!

Be careful, however, because the Facebook team used to validate names
could arbitrarily decide not to trust you and suspend your account
indefinitely.

* Look at the Moon, Not the Finger
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: look-at-the-moon-not-the-finger
  :END:

Jean and Martha trust their daughter. They know that the world is full
of dangers but they also know that bans are likely to be
counterproductive. 

They decided that the only way to deal with unknown dangers is to turn them into assessable risks. So they try to build a
relationship of mutual trust, which guarantees spaces of freedom
necessary for the formation of an adequate world experience.
