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Will the real Aliya Mustafina please step forward?

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Not a fake profile ... Aliya's unofficial fanpage has over 50,000 followers

Have you seen the film Spartacus, the bit where the Romans try to get Spartacus to give himself up, but fail because there are so many people who claim to be him?

The gymnastics online community is getting a little bit like that ... I did some counting this morning on Facebook, having come across yet another online profile of a gymnast that claimed to be 'real' yet obviously wasn't :-)

22 online profiles of Aliya Mustafina
29 of Viktoria Komova

Some of these are athlete pages that present news of the gymnast's progress, but many are simply fake identities that make use of personal photographs found elsewhere on the internet to develop whole new narratives of the gymnast's life.  I love my regular Gin O'Clock updates of HRH the Queen's daily life as much as the next person, but these profiles try to pretend to be the real Aliya or Vika, without the embellishment of humour or even a courtesy acknowledgement of the sources used.  I don't think any harm is meant ... but I would feel violated if somebody else grabbed my private pictures and began to pretend they were an online version of me ...

Interestingly, though I thought there might be similar counts for other gymnasts, the vast majority of the 'fakes' seems to be on these two.  Perhaps the English language speaking gymnasts have more opportunity to keep their identities private. I also think that these two - highly professional sports stars - deserve more official help in sensitively policing and promoting their online social media presence.
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  1. lilianamichelena2 June 2013 at 17:14

    It actually surprises me that the RGF hasn't done anything yet (especially after what happened with their ex-official websites last year). They need to have an american style social media approach (sharing a lot, media-trained everything); I understand both girls love their privacy and that's cool. But it's PR, and even if they feel like both of them deserve to be protected and they are not going to manage their official social accounts, they should, at least hire a CM.

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    Replies
    1. lilianamichelena4 June 2013 at 05:55

      Whoops, I meant they DON'T need and american style social media approach.

      Delete
  2. cpt.Hook3 June 2013 at 17:50

    I hope Russians will never adopt American social media approach. To watch American interviews is the most boring and useless thing ever. If you saw one, you saw them all. "it was great, it was fun, blah blah blah "

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown4 June 2013 at 04:07

    Well not all of them are fake, the ones that have the name of the gymnast and then the words online were "official" the creator had direct contact with the gymnasts, I know because pavlova has a profile on a certain page, and she and him talked a lot.

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  4. Unknown19 June 2013 at 16:35

    I agree completely, but you will find a lot of these so-called fake as friends in other profiles that claim to be real

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous30 July 2013 at 22:19

    As the person who started years ago the unofficial Aliya fb page, I must point out that we neeever ever pretended to be her, we even suggested fans not to add the fake Aliyas and despite of the fact that I speak russian, I prefer to leave the real Aliya alone instead of trying to befriend her and try to look oh-so-cool-and-important in the eyes of the gymnastics online community. As a matter of fact, me and Vitor don't want Aliya fans to add us on facebook so we rarely reveal our identity!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Queen Elizabeth31 July 2013 at 08:00

    I hope the article doesn't read as though I am attacking fan pages some of which of course can be informative and entertaining.

    All I am really saying is that given the number of fake identities on Facebook you would think somebody - most obviously the Federation, but I may be mistaken - would take up some positive PR and identity protection on behalf of these young girls.

    ReplyDelete

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