Friday evening brought terrible news. The Arizona State University instructor behind the Twitter account @Sciencing_Bi, a prominent voice in the online STEM community, had died of Covid-19. The news came from BethAnn McLaughlin, the founder of MeTooSTEM, who eulogized her friend in a Twitter thread.
Users posted tearful remembrances of @Sciencing_Bi, a Hopi woman who had posted about suffering from complications of the coronavirus and had criticized Arizona State for planning to return students and professors for fall instruction.
But by Sunday, the grief had turned to anger and confusion. It appeared that no one knew the true identity of @Sciencing_Bi. Evidence then surfaced suggesting that some photos tweeted by the account were stock images. An internet investigation was afoot, and several Twitter threads came to a jarring conclusion: @Sciencing_Bi was not a real person.
“Unfortunately, this appears to be a hoax,” Jerry Gonzalez, an Arizona State spokesperson, wrote in an email on Monday afternoon. “We looked into this over the weekend and were unable to verify any connection with the university.”
Who was the author of the apparently fake account? Skeptics looked to McLaughlin, who had announced @Sciencing_Bi’s death. McLaughlin had previously posted about paddling with @Sciencing_Bi in Yosemite and, while grieving for her friend, had written: “Looking at her side of the bed and crying.” Yet, when Rachel Leingang, an Arizona Republic reporter, emailed McLaughlin to ask about @Sciencing_Bi’s affiliation with Arizona State University, McLaughlin said she had only ever interacted with @Sciencing_Bi online.
McLaughlin did not answer a phone call or an email seeking comment on Monday morning. The journalist Ed Cara spoke with her by phone on Sunday night, and, in an article for Gizmodo, he reported that McLaughlin had denied creating the @Sciencing_Bi account but said she had access to it. She has met @Sciencing_Bi in person, she told Cara, and learned of the professor’s death through a family member. She declined to identify who the account’s creator was.
McLaughlin’s Twitter account has been suspended. The @Sciencing_Bi account was converted into a private account sometime Sunday night or Monday morning, and is also now suspended.
McLaughlin has a controversial history. She founded MeTooSTEM, a nonprofit aimed at aiding victims of sexual harassment in science, and then faced accusations from volunteers with the group that she had bullied them and had been particularly aggressive toward nonwhite volunteers she didn’t agree with. At least two waves of volunteers have quit the organization, in 2019 and this past February.
For one prominent scholar of the intersections of academic science and indigenous cultures, the controversy was shocking in some ways and a repetition of old harms in others. Kim TallBear, an associate professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, in Canada, had never heard of @Sciencing_Bi, but her colleagues filled her in on the story over the weekend.
“It doesn’t surprise me that she created a Native persona, if she did, if she wanted to shore up the perception that she had good relations with a woman of color,” TallBear said.
White Americans commonly claim Native ancestry, she said, and are less likely to choose to pretend to be Black because of the history of racism in the United States. “While Black was seen as a contamination of whiteness,” TallBear said, “the U.S. colonial project was to whiten Native people. They wanted to disappear us because the colonial powers wanted access to indigenous land.” That included intermarriage and assimilation.
No one person can know every scholar in a field, but TallBear found it telling that she didn’t know of anyone matching @Sciencing_Bi’s description, nor did any colleague’s death come up when she was on a Zoom call for Native genome scientists over the weekend.
“If there’s a Hopi scientist at ASU, we’d all know who they are,” she said. “Genocide means Native people are about 2 percent of the U.S. population. There are only a couple of degrees of separation [between us]. It just tells me that they don’t know anything about the Native world that they think they can create a person, particularly a Hopi scientist at Arizona State, and not get caught.”
Emma Pettit contributed reporting to this article.
