Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer  

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.   

In 2011, a Syrian blogger writing under the name Amina Arraf captivated the imagination–and in many cases, hearts–of a sizable, international readership. Arraf first began posting about her experiences as a lesbian living in Damascus, the capital of Syria, on the platform LezGetReal before starting her own blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus. During her time in the online spotlight, Arraf forged close bonds with other online writers and some of her readers. A few online acquaintances of Arraf had known her for five years – or so they thought. As would become clear, however, none of Arraf’s acquaintances knew who she really was. The attention that A Gay Girl in Damascus drew in mid-2011 was Arraf’s ultimate downfall: she was, in fact, the fabrication of an American man named Tom MacMaster. 

In hindsight, MacMaster’s hoax may seem outlandish, but A Gay Girl in Damascus could not have gone online at a more opportune moment. Western audiences were hungry for firsthand accounts of Syria, a nation wracked by protests in 2011 that erupted in response to the increasingly repressive administration of then-President Bashar Assad. 

International hopes were high for the future of Syrian democracy when Bashar Assad succeeded his father as president of the embattled nation in 2000. Assad promised a new commitment to democratic governance and civil liberties. By 2010, however, foreign journalists and human rights organizations had become wary of Assad’s growing power. “Ten years later, these initial hopes remain unfulfilled, and [Assad]’s words have not translated into any kind of government action to promote criticism, transparency, or democracy,” wrote the nonprofit Human Rights Watch in an influential statement published on July 16, 2010.  

Assad’s repression of dissent had begun mere months after he took office in 2000, but by 2010, it seemed inevitable that his power would continue to grow, and that his time in office would stretch on indefinitely. In a piece published on July 17, 2010, Jim Muir, Middle East correspondent for the BBC, wrote of Assad: “With no perceptible threat to his rule at present, he is looking less vulnerable than at many times over the past decade.” In the wake of Human Rights Watch’s statement on Assad, which Muir cites, international attention turned to Syria and the powerful pro-democracy protests that Assad brutally tried to suppress in the following year. It was during, and due to, this international media maelstrom that Amina Arraf’s blog arose as a public sensation. 

On June 11, 2011, a metaphorical bombshell dropped on A Gay Girl in Damascus: Arraf had been arrested, as described in an emergency guest post by her cousin, Rania Ismail. While readers were dismayed at this development, it came as no surprise. After all, it was yet another instance of the Assad regime’s repressive response to dissenters. Ismail wrote ominously, “We are hoping she is simply in jail and nothing worse has happened to her.”  

Readers’ initial comments on Ismail’s post represent the broader public response to Arraf’s arrest. Wrote one reader, 40 minutes after Ismail’s post went live:  

This is so sad and shocking. I do hope she will be released though. 

We must keep her profile and what happened to her very visible as the regime will not harm her if they know that she is in the news. 

Many readers of A Gay Girl in Damascus, like this commenter, believed they could play a role in Arraf’s fate through spreading awareness on social media. Arraf’s readers distributed a digital poster calling for her release across social media. 

The public outcry against Arraf’s arrest drew even more attention to her blog. In a burst of reporting immediately after Arraf’s ostensible arrest, NPR and other outlets such as The Electric Intifada debunked Arraf’s elaborate life story. Journalists’ investigations revealed the blog’s true writer to be Tom MacMaster, an American man who lived in the state of Georgia. His hoax had been multilayered. For instance, MacMaster had used photographs of real people without their permission to lend credibility to his fictitious persona, Amina Araff. Despite, or perhaps because of his hoax’s complexity, it was easy enough for journalists to tear apart, in the end. 

MacMaster confessed to his hoax six days after Arraf’s alleged arrest. Instead of issuing a standard apology, MacMaster claimed that he had been motivated to create the persona of Amina Arraf by a sincere desire to help Syrians; that his blog had accurately represented the situation on the ground in Syria; and that his lies had not caused any damage.  

MacMaster’s outing and confession became a flashpoint in a gradual, then sudden, decline of optimism toward social media-based activism and remains a notorious incident in the complex history of online hoaxes.