The Mystery of the Fake Ms. McClaren

It was quite a day for trolls yesterday.

I woke up to find a very strange person commenting on my Twitter feed with links to conspiracy theories alleging “democide,” which doesn’t mean “killing of demons” as I allegedly thought. I was told I was a witch and “fit for hell” for disbelieving them. There was also a gentleman in a black T-shirt and sunglasses who relentlessly trolled my page to ask if I was “triggered,” to quote canon law at me and to accuse me of being an unmarried woman who owned cats. I do like cats, though I can’t own one personally because my husband of thirteen years is allergic. I really should have ignored the troll, but instead I made a remark about Hot Topic which offended him so much her blocked me.

Both of these annoyances faded from memory, however, when I saw the tweet about the concentration camps.

Just about everyone who was on Twitter yesterday knows what I’m talking about.

An account by the name of Kathy McClaren, who claimed in her bio to be a 7th grade English teacher in Indiana, tweeted “I don’t condone N*z!sm, but maybe the mustache man was onto something. Maybe we need to bring that tactic back, but not toward the innocent Jews for following their religion, but on Trans for following pedophilic lifestyles.” And she topped it off with a photo of Auschwitz. The tweet had already been up for eight hours and quote tweeted a thousand times by frantic people asking their friends to report it, by the time I saw it and did the same. It’s thankfully gone now, but many people took screenshots.

Quite a few people were also trying to notify the school board of Ms. McClaren’s horrific views, as did I, and that’s where things started to get strange. The McClaren account said it was from Indiana, so I started searching for such a person in Indiana. There is no middle school English teacher named Kathy McClaren in Indiana, or at least there’s no record of her publicly online. There’s an ESL teacher with a nearly identical name in a whole other state, and I saw several people boasting that they’d called the school board in that district to get that ESL teacher into trouble. But that teacher’s linkedin showed a woman who didn’t look exactly like the woman in the Twitter account’s profile picture.

I scrolled down, and found that the offensive McClaren’s Twitter page was only two months old. Besides outrageous racist and queerphobic tweets, she also posted a handful of selfies showing a woman of about forty in a rather stiff pose. The teacher I’d found with the same name looked much younger.

I noticed Ms. McClaren was interacting with an account she claimed was her cousin’s. The cousin was a “Jeneveve” who lived in Baton Rouge, and a Google search didn’t reveal anyone with that spelling of the name in Baton Rouge.  Jeneveve’s account was as hair-raisingly offensive as McClaren’s. It followed nobody but McClaren and right wing media accounts. It was less than a month old. And the grammar of the tweets was exactly like McClaren’s– both terrible, for a supposed English teacher.

I smelled a rat.

It was clear to me that the actual English teacher McClaren was being set up.

Either the use of her name was a coincidence, or maybe the troll account was someone trying to smear her on purpose. Either way, the actual McClaren seems to have quite a lawsuit if she ever finds out who the troll was. I hope the schoolboard she works for realized she was innocent as quickly as I did.

I got on my own Twitter and begged everyone not to harass the actual Ms. McClaren, who doesn’t seem to have a Twitter account at all and whose linkedin has since been deleted. By that point, the tweet had been quote tweeted by angry people at least two thousand times, and others had gotten to work finding the origin of the troll’s profile photos– they were, in fact, stolen from other public accounts and didn’t belong to anybody named McClaren. Some people had found similar things with Jeneveve. Within half an hour, the McClaren account had been suspended and the Jeneveve account had deleted her own self.

This doesn’t really make a difference. The troll behind the prank probably has fifty different Twitter accounts. They’ve probably already tweeted something equally offensive and it will either go viral or it won’t. They’re already trolling from a new account and by the time you read this they’ll have moved on to another. That’s how these accounts work.

I’m left wondering what kind of person does this for a hobby.

There are so many interesting things to do with your time that don’t hurt anyone, but some people like to set up elaborate imaginary personas to incite violence against vulnerable groups and make life hell for teachers.

In any case, if you happen to see a screenshot of that horrendous tweet, don’t use it as an excuse to attack people– not transgender people and not an English teacher who had the bad luck to share a name with a fake.

If you’re joining in an internet pile-on, I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But be  careful to verify the target of your ire is who you think it is.

And now I’ve got to go feed my cats.