The story of the Gay Girl in Damascus – the blog that posted urgent and moving accounts of the plight of homosexuals in a brutal and oppressive regime, and then turned out to have been written by a man in Edinburgh – raises difficult issues.

Yes, it was a fraud, a hoax and a travesty. Agreed: it exposes the power and the unreliability of the internet. Who can dispute that the short, hectic life of Amina Arraf (aka Thomas MacMaster, a postgraduate at the university of Edinburgh) was not simultaneously tragic and farcical?

On the plus side, MacMaster's stunt has inadvertently shone a bright light on a murky and shameful aspect of Syrian society. It has also reminded the world of how the Syrian dictatorship has contrived to control the country's press. Crudely, human rights in Syria are now on the international agenda in a way that was not the case before MacMaster/Arraf started blogging.

On the debit side of the ledger, the Gay Girl in Damascus has no reality, and therefore no traction in the world of informed opinion. She was fiction. Her readers were conned, the blogosphere manipulated, and the safety of Syrian women possibly put at risk. It's not a pretty picture. Worst of all, perhaps, the important issue of Syrian government brutality has been confused with the bizarre fantasies of a middle-aged American academic who plainly wants to give up his day job.

But in fact, it was at precisely this point that I became intrigued by the Gay Girl in Damascus. When MacMaster said, in an interview, that writing the blog became "an experience like a novel", I found myself recalling Daniel Defoe's definition of fiction as "lying like truth".

This is marshy ground that has already swallowed up the rash, intruding figures of James Frey and many others before. But if MacMaster had offered the Gay Girl in Damascus as a meta-fiction (or whatever), who would have paid the slightest attention? Answer: no one. Not the blogosphere, and certainly not the international media. One sidelight of this curious affair has been the reminder that if you want to get readers' attention in a highly competitive marketplace, you have to pull every trick in the book.