MeTooStem founder BethAnn McLaughlin admitted to inventing a colleague and saying she’d died of COVID-19
Photo: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images Twitter is lousy with brands, bots, fakes, personas that read one-dimensional even as we take for granted a real person is trying to express something true about themselves. Less common, perhaps because less discussed, are accounts with all the markings of a genuine, committed poster whose IRL identity is something of a fabrication. Some serious scientist Twitter drama that’s been unfolding all week falls into this latter category.
On July 31, BethAnn McLaughlin — a neuroscientist known for being the founder and leader of MeTooStem, an organization founded to address sexual harassment in the sciences — tweeted she was “sad to report” that the anonymous scientist had “died from COVID this evening.” At this point it was still to be several days before McLaughlin admitted the anonymous professor was her own creation, and she wrote “No one has ever had my back like that. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
On Tuesday, McLaughlin finally admitted she’d made it all up, telling the Times through her lawyer, “I take full responsibility for my involvement in creating the @Sciencing_bi Twitter account … My actions are inexcusable. I apologize without reservation to all the people I hurt.
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