Josh Fiallo of The Daily Beast looks at the fake authors of the 34 commentary pieces on Business Insider that were pulled.
Fiallo writes, “The Beast’s review found several red flags within the since-deleted essays that suggest the writing did not reflect the authors’ lived experiences. This included contradictory information in separate essays by the same author, such as changing the gender and ages of their supposed children, and author-contributed photos that reverse-image searches confirm were pulled from elsewhere online.
“The author ‘Tim Stevensen’ claimed in one piece to have two daughters and a son, but four months later, he had ‘sons.’ ‘Stevensen’ was possibly the most prolific and contradictory of the ‘essayists.’ In seven articles he detailed how he had met his wife eight years ago; that he and his wife had children in their twenties; that he had worked 20-hour shifts for years; that he had been a high-school teacher for a decade before recently quitting to be a freelance writer; that he had ‘unpaid bills’; and that he and his wife wagered $5,000 for a weight-loss challenge.
“Another article by ‘Stevensen’ included a photo that he had supplied, which claimed to show him and his daughters. A reverse-image search revealed that the photo was of a man named Stowe Gregory, who wrote a personal essay months earlier for the i newspaper in the U.K. about his love for his step-daughters. The only Tim Stevensen listed in the U.S. did not respond to the Daily Beast, but is not a former high-school teacher.”
Read more here.
