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Sunday, October 28, 2018

That time Voldemort catfished Ginny Weasley


Arthur C. Clarke famously said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In the world of fantasy literature, it could also be said that any sufficiently developed magical system will someday resemble technology.

In the late 1990s, years before the rise of social media, J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In the book, young Ginny Weasley encounters a magical diary written by a former Hogwarts student named Tom Riddle. The diary speaks to her, not only vocalizing the recorded entries but having genuine interactive conversations. She considers it a special friend, despite her mother’s warnings to never listen to anything if she cannot see where it keeps its brain. Under the diary’s malign influence, she commits destructive acts.

In the end, Harry and his friends learn that Tom Riddle was the real name of the evil Lord Voldemort, and the diary is one of the horcruxes he used to preserve bits of his soul so he could rise from the dead. By engaging with the diary, Ginny became Voldemort’s puppet.

I thought of that book recently while listening to a BBC story about the ways predators impersonate celebrities on social media to target children. It is chilling how similar Tom Riddle’s diary is to a social media account. Years before Facebook, Myspace, or even Friendster, J.K. Rowling foresaw how we would one day interact with disembodied personalities who may be connected to malignant actors many miles away.

It isn’t only children who are vulnerable. Many of us follow Facebook accounts that feed us links to “news” stories that reinforce our political opinions and amplify our anger. It has recently come to light that a great many of these accounts are linked to foreign influence campaigns that push narratives on both ends of the political spectrum to different groups of people in order to drive wedges in American society. Some of the phony accounts have been taken down, but there is always a new magical diary popping up on social media to whisper in our ear. We click to follow accounts that tell us what we want to hear, even if we have no way to know who is behind the account or the source of their memes.

Fiction can teach us important truths. We should take Mrs. Weasley’s advice to heart. Never listen to anything if you cannot see where it keeps its brain.

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