If it is not a whiskered lake fish then what type of catfish am I talking about?

Usually I would hypertext you a link towards the Urban Dictionary website but according to MERRIAM-WEBSTER themselves the second definition of a catfish goes as follows:

a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes

I know what you must be thinking, “Mike, you silly little dingleberry, there wasn’t any internet in the 18th century. Let alone having a well respected American icon be a fraudster. Did you get this information from your aunt’s Facebook shares?”

First of all Facebook is lame (sorry anyone who have kids older than 15). Secondly, I’m pretty sure savage monk Martin Luther didn’t need a Twitter account to make his call-out thread cancelling the whole Holy Roman Catholic Church!

Low-hanging Millennial/Gen Z jokes aside, I believe that a lot of the things that the internet supposedly invented existed as a less evolved version. If you wanted to share a particularly controversial opinion like, say, dissolving your loyalty from the British monarchy in colonial North America then you can send a strongly worded letter to the local newspaper forum. Of course colonial newspapers at the time were more Chinese government than free speech entitled toxic political twitter, so any sort of bad-mouthing or constructive criticism would get you jailed for a fairly long time.

However, just because the colonial powers were violating now basic human rights doesn’t mean that you can’t have a little fun. That’s where little Benjamin Franklin comes in. Benjamin was one of those kids that really got writing. If Benjamin Franklin were to Dungeon Master a D&D campaign you could bet your bottom dollar he would find a way to spin your boring generic elf character into a Shakespearian tragic figure with more pages of emotional layers than a Scooby Doo ham sandwich. A 16-year old with such an affinity for the written word would surely like to prove himself somehow. His best bet was his brother, James Franklin, who ran a local Boston newspaper called the Courant. James, sadly, decided not to publish any of his letters towards his prestigious newspaper, despite the talent of the young boy.

But instead of sticking his nose down to finish his apprenticeship on his brother’s news press, he thought of something genius. Ben would think of a pen name so unlike him there would be no reason to suspect that the letters ever came from a 16 year old ambitious little brother. He would write as a widow named Silence Dogood, a poetic and witty lady with three children, who would charm readers to the point of getting romantic letters commending her wit and lamenting her sad backstory. Some even wrote to “Mrs. Dogood” to request her hand in marriage. That’s right, famous diplomat and American icon Benjamin Franklin catfished Boston as a 16-year old boy!

It went on for 14 letters, and Franklin feeling chuffed about getting a ton of attention and praise for his letters came clean towards James about the real identity of Ms. Dogood. Of course James responded with a nice friendly pat on th- just kidding James berated Benjamin and emotionally abused him for lying to him and breaking his trust to the point that the poor young Ben had to flee to Philly to escape the toxicity of his brother.

For those of you booing at James for this extreme reaction I would like to see you react towards THIS situation. Imagine running a highly acclaimed web forum/news site and hiring a sexy, smart, flirtatious content writer for your editorial section. Her opinions are concise, agreeable and outrageously funny; she responds to haters in the comments with enough playful wit to envy a Twitter account with a corporate brand name. I imagine you might think, “damn, too bad she’s anonymous… if I just knew who she was I could ask her out,” only to figure out that your snotty little brother who isn’t even old enough to finish high school made her all up.

I would be pretty damn pissed too.

Well as technology progresses more will stay the same, as evidenced by this story. Trolls will keep on trolling, haters will keep on hating, and people will still fake being women to dupe some poor sod.