> They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.

That's exactly correct, and now we are one step closer to understanding the precession of simulacra of identity.

The crude maps of the 16th century cartographer were of such low fidelity and accuracy that it became impossible to confuse them with the territory, with all its contours and nuances elided from the scribbles of ink on parchment. Contrast with Google Maps, that has captured the earth in such exquisite detail, down to the meter, that we now regard it as a more or less one-to-one representation of the Earth in itself; a simulacrum of the "first order," which "is the reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard 1981).

But the representation does not stop there; now with things like listings of local businesses, we have progressed to a simulacrum of the "second order," which "masks and denatures a profound reality" - does your business even exist, if I can't find it on Google Maps? If your road has signage calling it one thing, while Google Maps calls it another [0], which name is correct? How will your GPS navigate such a world when the map and the territory have diverged this far from one another?

The end game of the precession is the creation of entire virtual worlds and maps (think, de_dust2) that represent no territories at all, but are a territory in their own virtual right - a simulacrum of the "fourth order," or "the hyperreal:" "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Alan Watts spoke of a similar phenomenon in one of his lectures on meditation [1]:

The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.

We are now at a stage where the newer generations have confused these symbols of ourselves - Reddit, Facebook, Instagram accounts - with the actual people in themselves. It has become possible to capture, record, misrepresent, mask, and denature our lives and the people within them to such a high degree of fidelity, that, just as it has become possible to confuse Google Maps with the territory of the Earth itself, it becomes possible to confuse the Reddit account for the real person. The social media account, having "precessed" far past the point of "denaturing a profound [person]" through Photoshop and Instagram filters, has now achieved "hyperreality," where the Reddit account now _becomes_ a person in its own right. The real person _is_ the Reddit account, and the Reddit account _is_ the person.

If it happened with God in the quarrels between the iconoclasts and the idol worshipping iconolaters, it can happen with mere mortals, too:

This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today. [...] that
deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever
existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own
simulacrum-from this came their urge to destroy the images.

- Baudrillard, 1981.

[0] https://support.google.com/maps/thread/154775503/google-won-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w