If I could clone myself I wouldn't have done it on Instagram. I went there because of misplaced optimism. Everyone was talking about Instagram poets and I had quite a few short poems, they'd be good wouldn't they?
I've always seen myself as technically competent. I had one of the earliest Macs, as a young reporter I was shown the offices where Eddie Shad was revolutionising newspaper production.
I've fitted new memory into a laptop, I've sorted out problems with broadband, I've backed up and backed up, changed passwords....I joined Facebook. And that was where my Instagram clone was conceived.
If I imagine a clone, it's a 65 year old woman in allotment clothes bending over a line of lettuces in someone's memory - not truly a clone, but a quick charcoal drawing, or the kind of monoprint my friend Jane Fordham makes.
But no, the clone trying to con good people out of cash is me with a fullstop interrupting the name I've had since childhood, Jackie. The name I shared with a magazine and wife of a president.
The clone has copied everything I've posted, including a desperate change of profile picture, from portrait of me at Kings Lynn Poetry Festival by my publisher Tony Ward, to mum's garden buddha. When the clone stole the buddha it was the last straw. I downloaded a stock photo of a can of spam and made that my profile pic.
I've reported the impersonation to Instagram five times, included proof of ID (passport and driving licence), and other Instagram users have reported it too. But it takes up so much time. So I've gone for full deletion after temporarily disabling it. Minutes after deleting, I had an email from Facebook saying they haven't received acceptable ID that matches information on the account. I guess it was also from a bot. In my pointless reply to the bot I wrote:
"I've just deleted my genuine account, so if you want, as a company, to be seen to enable fraud and impersonation, be my guest....I have decided to withdraw totally from social media in order to protect my name."
I've discovered people who tried for months to get Instagram to delete a cloned account and I can't be bothered to go head to head with the deep capitalists to secure such a tiny place in the sun where the bots are rampaging through beautiful places with their fundamentalism, botox and lies.
 |
| Mum's garden buddha and cat. The buddha's face was one of my profile pics which the Instagram clone stole with impunity. |
I was leaving social media anyway. Instagram was something I rescued from the charity shop bag. But last night, I looked at my followers. Men with steroid arms and tattoos, women pouting, boardroom men in suits, men topless hugging dogs, men claiming to be religious and after a good woman, all of them with numbers after their names.
There it was, photo proof of the bots. And I realised as I blocked them, that my complaints to Instagram would also be dealt with by bots.
I feel a bit sad that there's someone pretending to be me after all the work I've put into my writing.
There is now only a cloned account on Instagram purporting to be me: jack.iewillspoet
Note the full stop is in the middle of my first name.
But I can't do any more to limit the fraud. It seems cloning is thriving despite public pronouncements by Instagram. I did all the company asked to prove I am who I am - jackiewillspoet without a full stop - but my name, punctuated randomly, now belongs to a criminal clone, fed, watered, prayed to and cheered on by Instagram.
Comments