On Monday, Andy Pickering posted tamtampamela’s now infamous “God is so good!!!” YouTube video on his Facebook page. Presciently, he started his comment with “IF this girl is being sincere (rather than some misguided skit) …” and his scepticism was rewarded when the young lady finally admitted she’s a troll. She had to “come clean” as she puts it because of the international outcry she caused. Notice that this was a public outcry; the media was largely silent – they seemed to twig that this wasn’t what it appeared to be. As I write, “tamtampamela” has only a couple of dozen hits on Google News. By contrast, you can currently find about 750 news stories online about Alexandra Wallace, whose YouTube rant “Asians in the Library” has also been busy causing offence this week.

As Meenal Kulkarni pointed out in the Facebook thread, tamtampamela’s video is an excellent example of Poe’s law in action. In 2005, Nathan Poe wrote “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake [it] for the genuine article.” How right he was! And how well tamtampamela played her role. I know a lot of people are very upset with her, but I have to say that I think she should be proud of her achievement. I don’t like trolls or trolling (even if now and again I can’t resist dipping my toe in the water and trying a little devil’s advocacy myself) but I guess it’s an art like any other, and if it’s done well and is successful, there’s something to be admired.

By the way, if you’re wondering why I’m so sure that tamtampamela is not a Christian fundamentalist, it just so happened that I was looking at her videos this morning at the very moment she closed her YouTube account and the message “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by LaughAloneTV” appeared where the video used to be.