"The Strange Web Saga of Emokid21: How an internet faker set YouTube on fire with haters, imitators and investigators"
<URL:http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-spinoff-emokid,1,7057627.htmlstory?coll=la-headlines-entnews >
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<x-tad-bigger>The Strange Web Saga of Emokid21
</x-tad-bigger>How an internet faker set YouTube on fire with haters, imitators and investigators.
<x-tad-smaller>By Deborah Netburn</x-tad-smaller>
<x-tad-bigger>In a phone interview on Friday morning Benjamin Castelow Johnson, a 22-year-old International Politics major at the University of Whales said that the saga of Emokid21 Ohio began when Johnson decided not to go home for the Easter holiday.
Bored at his near empty school Johnson decided to shoot a fake video blog as a character named "Emokid21 Ohio" -- a whiny, self-involved, American college student with a penchant for wearing knit caps and hooded sweatshirts. "Some people say you don't even know what emo is, I'm like God, seriously, we do" he said in the first blog post.
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</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-bigger> Johnson continued to post new Emokid21 Ohio blogs almost daily and they quickly became one of the most discussed videos on YouTube (mostly because YouTube users thought he was so annoying). At the same time Johnson told a friend of his from home about his project and she began her own fake video blog as a character named "Emogirl" who loves bad poetry and perpetually has thick chunks of hair obscuring her face.
Over the next week Emogirl and Emokid21 Ohio received so much hate mail that CBS News (believing Emokid21 Ohio really existed) contacted Johnson to see if they could interview him for a piece they were doing about bullies. Johnson also got an email from MTVu (MTV's college themed website) to see if he would be willing to do something for their website and Johnson discovered there were whole message board threads devoted to his character on thesuperficial.com website.
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<x-tad-bigger>And then the mockery started. People began to make spoofs of Emokid21 Ohio and Emogirl's blogs, such as this one from "Emodog21."</x-tad-bigger>
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<x-tad-bigger> But two weeks into the emo project the foundations began to crumble. YouTube sleuths began to suspect that Emokid21 Ohio was not from Ohio after all, and that he was actually from Britain. Trying desperately to defend himself against these accusations he filmed a vblog called, "SO IM NOT FROM OHIO, EH" and flashed a social security card and tax records at the camera to try to prove his point.But YouTube members weren't buying it. After some fancy video detective work a YouTube user named Kol Guild posted a video called "EmoKid...The Brit Git":
</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC66SMV0smb8&search=Emo%20KolGuild%20Bitch%20Ohio%20Girl%20Comments</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>
On April 26, three weeks after it all began, it ended. Somebody discovered Johnson's real life My Space page (which made it clear he was actually British) and began to circulate it around the Internet.
Johnson said he wasn't disappointed. "It was beginning to get a little silly, the amount of emails I was getting," he told us. "I've still got so many I have to get through."
He and his childhood friend ended the emo saga with two fake BBC newscasts.
Following their lead, the voice of Emodog came clean too. It turns out he was some guy who used to work on "The Howard Stern Show."
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