Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 24, 2023
Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.
They do not exist.
Nada.
It's not often (read: ever) that I get to post about drama from my country, but this one is hot off the press and I think you guys might find interesting.
Full info is in the nitter thread, but here's a quick rundown:
QRD
Eduards Sizovs is some bloke that organizes and runs several international tech conferences, of those the two that are important to this are DevTernity and JDkon, though there are others
Apparently the organizers of these events do not accept applications from potential speakers, but instead reach out to people they are interested in, thus creating this more of a closed group of speakers.
Well, now as it turns out, there are fake speakers that are signed and advertised at these conferences (and have been in the past). In reality, they are merely fake online personas created by Eduards, and have never actually appeared at any of his events. Currently 4 such personas have been identified, all of them being women.
Here's Alina Prokhoda, a speaker at the upcoming DevTernity conference with prior experience at WhatsApp and Microsoft MVP who has been identified as a non-existent person who has never worked for those companies:
And here's Anna Boyko, with the same issues
Besides these there's also Julia Kirsina who worked as Uber's software Architect in Estonia, despite Uber not even having such division in that country, and there's also Natalie Standler who (didn't) work at coinbase.
Eduards has pushed back against the notion of him creating fake speakers by saying that a single fake was added by accident, but was quickly proven wrong when it was shown that these 4 fine ladies have been signed up to his conferences on 5 different occasions in total, and yet have given 0 speeches, without anyone ever seeing them in person.
This caused the organizer to go into full damage control mode as other, actually real speakers started pulling out of the conference after being informed of the controversy
But how could this happen? Surely someone would've noticed that these people don't exist?
Well, as it turns out, while the people themselves are fake, they have a very real online presence- we're talking several different social media accounts with over 100k followers, actively posting motivational quotes about girls who code, all while hiding behind what are likely AI-generated pictures of women. In short, Eduards has been quite successfully running several catfish accounts pretending to be women 
Even Kiwifarms' LFJ gave her opinion on the matter, which is a complete 
moment which just shows that fricking everything and everyone is connected 
So now for the big question: why would he do it?
Well, the guy who broke this story speculates that the reason behind why every fake persona is a woman is that Eduards, the organizer, has been trying to up his DEI compliance to attract bigger fish to his conferences by making them seem more inclusive than they really are, and probably to get some gibs/shoutouts from the organizations that promote such nonsense in the first place. Oh, and of course to milk attendees who pay... up to 800$ to attend? WTF people? 
Well, now he's been caught and his entire life's work will likely go down the drain. Sucks to suck 
So what's your opinion? Is the dude based for duping r-slurs, or is he an r-slur himself for thinking no one would find out?
I would like to apologize if this is a bit clumsily written because I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here trying to write about shit I have no understanding of off twitter, but I wanted to do it quickly so none of you strags manage to snitch it first
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