You’re halfway through your morning coffee when a headline stops you mid-sip.
A university student… expelled? Not for cheating. Not for violence, but because someone online pretended to be them, and used that fake identity to harass others.
It sounds like the kind of misunderstanding that should be cleared up with a quick conversation.
Except it wasn’t.
It escalated into a formal complaint, a disciplinary hearing, and now a lawsuit.
The story was covered here.
When Someone Else Creates a Version of “You”
What stays with you isn’t just what happened to this student, it’s how easy it was for someone else to create a version of them online. A version that looked close enough to cause real harm before anyone thought to ask, “Is this actually you?”
That’s the part many people don’t realize:
Your digital identity isn’t only shaped by what you do.
It can be shaped, quietly, unexpectedly, by what someone else does in your name.
When Identity Becomes Something You Have to Untangle
I learned that lesson long before social media impersonation became common.
Years ago, when my kids were small and I was juggling diaper bags and snacks on a busy weekend trip to the mall, my checkbook disappeared somewhere between stores. I didn’t notice until we got home. By then, the person who took it had already gone on a shopping spree.
– I filed a police report.
– I worked with the bank.
– I sent letters to the credit bureaus.
It took several years to repair the damage.
I still have the folder of evidence.
What struck me then (and still does now) is how quickly someone else’s actions became my responsibility to fix. The mess wasn’t mine, but the fallout was.
That’s the unspoken truth of digital identity today:
You can be careful, thoughtful, even private, and still find yourself cleaning up the consequences of something you didn’t do.
What Digital Identity Really Is (and Isn’t)
When impersonation happens, the lines blur quickly:
A fake profile with your name.
A message you never sent.
A version of “you” behaving in ways you wouldn’t recognize.
Suddenly, your identity starts to feel less like something you control and more like something you have to occasionally untangle.
So what does digital common sense look like in a world where someone else can shape your online reflection?
It begins with something simple:
- Your real accounts.
- Your real usernames.
- Your real online presence.
When you know your true digital footprint, it becomes much easier to spot the moments that don’t fit.
Checking your core accounts: email, social platforms, anything tied to your name, won’t prevent impersonation. But it does make false versions easier to notice before they cause real-world damage.
When the Story Doesn’t Match Who You Are
As for the student, they’re now fighting to clear their name. Their case may set a precedent, but the lesson is already here:
your digital identity lives in more places than you think, and not all of those places are controlled by you.
Sometimes protecting it isn’t about settings or passwords. It’s about being grounded in what’s truly yours so you can say, gently but firmly: “That wasn’t me.”
A helpful next step
If you want something you can keep and reference later, I’ve put together a short guide called Digital Identity & Online Impersonation. It walks through what to do when someone pretends to be you online: how to document what’s happening, report the fake account, and correct false assumptions early.
So your identity stays anchored to you, not someone else’s version of you.