Photo by Gabriella Rodriguez ’27
Mount Holyoke College was one of several American colleges and universities to have its students recently targeted online by politically charged Instagram accounts.
By Aoife Paul Healy ’26
STAFF WRITER
Content warning: This article references mass death and imperialist violence.
Several accounts appearing to masquerade as current college students have targeted Mount Holyoke College, along with Sarah Lawrence College, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Florida State University and the University of Arkansas.
These accounts have pushed vague, possibly political agendas, instigating arguments with actual students and student-led organizations on campus. Who is behind these accounts, what do they want and how and why did they target Mount Holyoke College?
In early November of 2023, Bee Mayberry ’25 was contacted via Instagram by an account alleging to be part of Mount Holyoke College’s Class of 2027. I’ll refer to the owner of this account by the name and pronouns provided in the account’s bio: “Maya Marmann, she/they.”
During my interview with them, Mayberry described their conversation with Marmann as uncomfortable and aggressive. “I had posted a Starbucks boycott post. ... [Then] I got a message from someone who had followed me ... earlier in the day,” Mayberry said. “I figured they were a MHC student, they seemed like a regular account. They said I was ableist for encouraging this since Starbucks was their safe food. It threw me off. ... It’s an interesting take.”
Mayberry responded to Marmann, explaining that they supported the boycott and are against the occupation of Palestine. In response, Marmann asked how Israel was occupying Palestine and used the tone tag “genuine (/gen).” Tone tags, also known as tone indicators, are used to directly convey a tone of voice in a digital message which can help indicate intent for those who have difficulty detecting the intended attitude behind an online text.
Mayberry continued, “Before I could respond to that, they responded, ‘ur experiences dont define all of ours,’ and using a fake tone tag, ‘/fm (fucking mad).’”
“I finally was over it, I figured it was some kind of troll account,” Mayberry said. “And they went through a weird roleplay scenario of them walking away, and that’s where the conversation ended. I decided to block them.”
Mayberry added, “It felt like one of those situations where you couldn’t help but laugh since someone was taking the time out of their day to do this. … This was a pro-Israel account made specifically to go after students like me, to ragebait them into an argument to make them say something that could be used against them.”
The conversation with Marmann was a little painful to read — intentionally so, I assume. It relies on irony and sarcasm to keep it afloat, parodying “the average Mount Holyoke student.”
At the time, Marmann’s account was new, which she acknowledged in her bio. Marmann had first posted on Nov. 16 and every comment on her posts came from two other accounts that became active the same day as Marmann’s first post. “Kathy Kapplan” and “Olivia Whyte” claimed to be Class of 2027 students attending Sarah Lawrence and the University of California, Santa Barbara, respectively.
Both of these colleges are notably progressive and left-leaning schools. I suspect that these accounts parodied the left-leaning opinions of their target campuses. They also boosted each other’s validity. According to Deutsche Welle, a short account history is often a warning sign that an account is fake. Having multiple accounts comment under each post may have been a way for newer accounts like Marmann’s and Whyte’s to counteract this red flag, as if saying “look, other people know me!”
Initially, in early November, Marmann described herself as a “panromantic demisexual Jew for Jesus” and a theater nerd. Kapplan originally did not claim a college but added Sarah Lawrence later in the month. She used ze, they, he and she pronouns and described herself as “demi, sapio, pan, more & post-gender,” an “activist,” and “Israeli & Korean.” Whyte had “free Palestine” in their bio with two United Arab Emirates flags beside it and referred to their friends as “quings,” noted as “gender-neutral royalty.”
Being a Mount Holyoke student, I didn’t look into Whyte and Kapplan’s identities as much as I looked into Marmann’s. Still, in the context of these accounts, their existence is notable. Kapplan appears to be much more of an obvious parody of queer individuals than the other two, and Whyte is a good point of analysis for the strong political tone of this effort.
Marmann and Kapplan both placed Israeli flags in their bio. Whyte, out of the three, is the only account attempting to mimic Palestinian support, though they used the United Arab Emirates flag emojis and posted “from the river to the see,” misspelling ‘sea,’ on an Instagram story.
The two also reposted a significant amount of information on their stories about queerness through the lens of Israeli support. Stories included details as to how “homosexual acts are illegal under Hamas in Gaza” and memoirs of individuals who were “pillars of the Israeli Trans community.” Framing Zionism through queer support is a form of ‘pinkwashing’ — promoting LGBTQ+ rights to distract from ulterior agendas.
Now, it isn’t unprecedented for some individuals to get bored and attempt to turn important topics and identities into jokes — some people don’t have anything better to do. I didn’t initially feel concerned by these accounts; they didn’t seem believable enough. Marmann’s photos of our campus come up on Google. Her posts were likely stolen photos of high schoolers at a senior prom.
What was most concerning was the action of reaching out and starting a discussion. It takes effort to comb through other student’s stories to find something to argue about. With two other schools roped in, I was worried about the scale of this operation and the amount of effort being put into it.
While I initially reached out to administrative services on campus about these accounts in December, I filed an official formal report in February. Eventually, after a bit of extra follow-up, I received something solid— as far as the administration could tell, there was no student enrolled in the class of 2027 named Maya Marmann.
It was at least reassuring to have those suspicions confirmed. I checked back in on how the accounts were doing throughout the process. In late November, Marmann had reached out to the MHC For Palestine Instagram account, previously @mhcforpalestine, a community on campus dedicated to standing “against genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of any kind.” (Editor’s note: MHC for Palestine is now I-Change for Palestine: Action. The name of its Instagram account is now @icforpalestine.action).
Marmann sent lengthy messages arguing that Israel’s actions in Gaza were not a “genocide.” The account blocked Marmann, who then posted a screenshot of their story, writing, “Love how MHC for Palestine just blocks everyone who disagrees with them instead of having a respectful conversation!”
She did the same for a Mount Holyoke News post regarding a “Letter to the Editor” article titled “Anti-Zionism does not equal antisemitism.”
“If you don’t support Jews having a right to exist in their indigenous homeland, then you are anti semitic! … MHC, we need to do better,” Marmann posted to their story.
The accounts made a few more posts and stories between November and February, but I caught nothing as directly inflammatory as their previous statements — it was difficult to monitor while simultaneously being employed and a full-time student.
While writing this article, Marmann seems to have transferred to Florida State University. Whyte now seems to go to the University of Arkansas. While Whyte’s account originally indicated no religious affiliation, when I checked in on her a few months later, she had a star and crescent in her bio — a recognized symbol for Islam. She’d at least gotten her Palestinian flag right by now. Kapplan stayed about the same.
So, why is this still relevant? Why does it matter if someone had too much free time on their hands and decided to troll Mount Holyoke?
Well, these accounts didn’t seem to be a topic of discussion for Mount Holyoke students. Even though Marmann was actively attempting to “call out” our peers and student organizations online, several dozen real Mount Holyoke students still followed the account as of late January. I knew several of these individuals in real life, and they wouldn’t support what Marmann was saying.
“Initially, I had dismissed them as people weaponizing important topics to provoke a response, to prod at left-leaning colleges for fun. This seems bigger than that — or maybe I am underestimating how much free time one can have. ”
The fact that Marmann’s account was relatively successful likely comes from the online culture surrounding the College, where students add individuals they don’t personally know, provided the account claims to be a fellow student.
I attended Dr. Riv-Ellen Prell’s campus talk on “Christian Nationalism, White Power, and American Antisemitism” on April 11, 2024. She discussed the concept of “humorously detached deniability,” an important tool for building insider relationships with other radical individuals.
Dr. Prell discusses this as a form of communication mainly used by alt-right communities and as a tactic rooted in cowardice, designed to garner support for serious and aggressive political ideas while portraying those within the community in question as “just joking.” It is an attempt to avoid the ramifications of supporting serious political efforts often rooted in hate.
Marmann employs these efforts. Awkwardly roleplaying in an Instagram argument is laughable, as it was designed to be. But mimicking queer labels while repeatedly publicly pushing pinkwashing efforts toward Mount Holyoke students is, at its core, about Israel and Palestine.
It is interesting to consider who could be behind these accounts and what they want. Initially, I had dismissed them as people weaponizing important topics to provoke a response, to prod at left-leaning colleges for fun. This seems bigger than that — or maybe I am underestimating how much free time one can have.
It’s been almost six months since these accounts targeted the College, but Whyte was still posting on their story in late April. These newly targeted schools are notably less outwardly progressive than Mount Holyoke. Having the political agenda of the accounts — if there is a genuine one — layered under irony makes it more difficult to understand.
Are they attempting to improve or damage Israel’s reputation? Why target students? Are these serious pinkwashing attempts? Why pick these schools? Is there some other motive?
The motivation for this behavior remains unknown. The important takeaways are that student impersonations are happening, Mount Holyoke students were targeted — alongside other schools — and it’s still happening today.
Until the very last day of publication, I had been mulling over the photos being used to fake these accounts. I wondered whose photos had been stolen, and if they knew about what was going on — and then, yesterday, I found them: the real people whose images had been stolen to make the fake accounts.
These events are still unfolding. Stay tuned in to Mount Holyoke News for more updates.