CATFISHING

A form of misrepresentation or deception­ where someone creates a fake identity to fool others, eg. a fifty-year-old man creates an online identity pretending to be a twenty-year old woman, or more benignly, someone on a dating site shaves fifteen pounds and five years off their actual weight and age, or Photoshops their image to make them look hotter than they might be in real life. The person who does the catfishing is called a catfish. The term comes from the 2010 documentary by Schulman and Joost called “Catfish.”