“Rafaela”. My Rafaela? “Rafaela, let me see when you pick me up.” “Rafaela, you made me laugh.” “Rafaela”. “Rafaela”. “Rafaela”. These are just a few of the dozens of unanswered audio messages posted on Facebook by a man who, at least on social media, is called “S. Cat Raphaela Voulistiotis, from August to September. “We didn’t have mutual friends, so I don’t know how he found me.” she says “K”. At first, her messages were annoying. “Later I realized he was in trouble,” he says. The constant messages, almost exclusively containing her name, began to take the form of harassment. However, he did not answer. The matter was forgotten. Until last week, when S. S.” has become a phenomenon Greek social networks.

It all started when the page on Instagram called “antrasstigma” and posted anonymous “aggressive” messages sent by men to women on social media to ridicule them and raise awareness, he uploaded a video of an audio message sent by a man to a girl named Katerina.

“Katerina, good evening,” the audio recording began on Facebook. “First of all, let me tell you that I am not looking for anything and I am not missing anything. Thank God, I am a good child, humanly, and I sent only you. I just tried to add you on Facebook and couldn’t. Is it easy for you to make me yourself? And don’t worry, I’m not going to bother you. And I tell you this because you have seen a lot on this piece of land, as I have. If you don’t want to, alas, just tell me and I respect that.” Instead of Katerina, a man answered the message, which angered S., causing him to send a vulgar audio recording that began with the words: “Listen, you bastard, it’s not enough that I correspond with another and talk to her.” he went on in words that could not be printed, and added: “Did she understand who was speaking to her?” The first day the antrasstigmh page uploaded this video to Instagram, it was viewed by thousands of people. “Then a lot of women started commenting on the video and also texting me saying that he sent them the same messages.” says “K” page administrator whose name is at the disposal of “K”. He then also uploaded the video to TikTok, where nearly 1.5 million users have already viewed it. Other girls appeared who received the same messages from the same account – admin ‘antrasstigmh’ refers to “K” that since March 22, about 200 girls have talked to her, in which “S.” sent identical messages from 2016 until last month.

The issue was quickly resolved popular. Dozens of girls started uploading videos with audio recordings sent to them by “S.” “Zoe, did you get my ringtone?” he told one of them nine times from October to December 2022. “Maria, did you get my audio tape?” he said dozens of times to someone else. He asked a few to talk on the phone or camera, telling them that if they didn’t have a card, he could buy one for them. He talked to most of the girls about his ex, some of whom he said they had been together for 4 years, others 7, using the same words over and over. Some answered him at first, some from time to time, some never answered. At some point, his voice, like almost everyone else, changed. He became aggressive or vulgar, using the same words in all of them.

Songs and memes

As video messages began to proliferate, some social media users created digital content based on their content. The songs were written in the voice of “S.”, some of which had been played in the clubs of Athens in previous days. They have become political memes. They made several users wonder, and not only, whether this is a real person, an AI, or an experiment in social behavior. According to press reports, he was called “the vulture”.

However, one of the questions that this particular case has raised is why it all went viral. 22-year-old administrator of the page “antrasstigma” – who says “K” that she regrets uploading the video, unwittingly causing an avalanche of digital backlash – she believes it has to do with the way she talked to the girls. “I think the lines he spoke really got people’s attention; At first I thought it was a joke because he said them,” he says. But she later regretted it, both because she heard and read – “I did not expect something so rude,” she says, and because she was contacted by the man’s relatives, stating that the impact on the “criminal” is traumatic. “However,” he adds, “everyone calls him a robot, but he exists, he is a real person.”

The professors tell K about the impact, the speed of the news, and the reaction of the public.

Among other things, the case attracted the interest of the Potential Reality Laboratory, Online Research and Education of the Pantheon Department of Psychology. “We watched it” – says Konstantinos Koskinas “K”.emeritus professor of sociology, specializing in potential reality, and previous director of the laboratory, “because it seemed strange to have a conversion – he himself had behavior that we can describe and see elements of his psychopathology, but what interests us in how society becomes susceptible to it, and in its low degree of resistance.

OUR Nikos PanagiotouAssociate Professor, Department of Journalism and Media, AUTI, says “K” so that the message has all the necessary characteristics to become viral. “The audience loves to impress and this message was easy to impress because of the phrase he used,” he says. “After seeing breaking news,” he adds, “the public rebroadcasts it—in our attempt to highlight or blame the message, we advocate for it to spread even more, that’s a characteristic of social media.”

“State of Curiosity”

According to Mr. Koskin, who emphasizes that when he saw the first video, it seemed to him that “S. It was bot (an automated mechanism for creating fake internet profiles), it wouldn’t matter even if it was a ruse. What matters is how the public reacts. “It’s an outrageous message, it’s funny so it creates intimacy, you don’t forget about it – it’s a pre-designed profile, it says he’s a nice guy from the start, not to leave any question marks about him, but in the end. In the end, it creates some mystery about who this person is who sends the message, causing young people to become curious that they are involved in something that has a secret, ”he argues.

It is important, he notes, that the initial message is always soft and then often becomes aggressive. “Communication on the Internet plays between romance and cynicism,” he notes. The cynicism is that one user does not see the other and cannot be detected – “I can even curse or intimidate you, but you will not know who I am,” he says. Communication takes on the character of “pseudo-truth, in a state of meta-truth,” he emphasizes. “The problems of schizophrenia, multiple personality, everything related to parallel personalities, in real life it would be visible, but not on the Internet,” he adds.

Romance, on the other hand, is about reproducing lyrical words and symbols, creating a representation of a real relationship, although Mr. Koskinas points out that lust, for example, cannot be real on the Internet – it’s a fantasy. Not, of course, romance or love – “there are no elements of personal contact here,” he points out. In a digital world, the psychopathology of a case cannot be measured in terms and indicators that specialists use when visiting a patient, Mr. Koskinas says. “The digital environment is a new environment that is born from the social, but develops more and more independently, more and more moving away from the social,” he emphasizes.

The reason why digital courtship is so different from the physical world is because the communication opportunities created by the Internet start with the question, “If I can, then why not?” says Mr. Koskinas. “Once someone goes through this first stage of self-control, they get into a situation where the rules of social behavior do not play a role in communication,” he says. This is a digital environment that does not have a high degree of risk. However, if the same behavior is transferred to the social sphere, it becomes dangerous and can develop into stalking, sexual harassment, pedophilia, he explains. “In addition to bullying, hate speech, denigration of women, which are very serious problems on the Internet, we must carefully monitor the transfer of the behaviors we describe from the digital to the social environment,” he emphasizes.

As the world evolves, technology advances, and we interact with them, we need to protect social structures and relationships on many levels, he said. According to Mr. Koskinas, today one can still easily distinguish the pain of some messages in the digital environment. “As our environment becomes more and more digital, this will become increasingly difficult.”