Model becomes a meme - blighting her career
A Taiwanese model, who became a meme and then the victim of a hoax plastic surgery story, said it has ruined her career. Heidi Yeh says it all started when she took a job in an advert for a plastic surgery company in 2012.
She told the BBC that despite never having had surgery herself, she appeared in the advert alongside a good looking model and three pretty children. The company digitally altered the three children to make their eyes look very small and their noses flat. The caption read: "The only thing you'll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids."
Unfortunately for Yeh, the image was also used by another plastic surgery clinic and on Facebook, and it started to be shared across the internet as a meme with the caption "Plastic surgery - you can't hide it forever."
Things got even worse later that year when a Chinese tabloid newspaper attached the image to a fake story that had first sprung up eight years earlier - about a fictional husband who was said to have sued his wife because she hid her plastic surgery from him and then when the children were born, they looked nothing like her.
She told the BBC that the story spread around the world, and people started believing it. Clients started to think she'd had plastic surgery, and the work dried up. Shangaiist has reported that she and the plastic surgery company are now threatening to sue one another.
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Internet blight
Yeh is the latest in a long line of people whose lives have taken a turn for the worse after falling foul of social media. One striking example was30-year-old corporate communications executive Justine Sacco, who made an ill-advised joke on twitter about catching AIDS just before she got on a plane to Cape Town.
By the time she landed 11 hours later she was trending worldwide on Twitter and her reputation and career were damaged forever. A few weeks later she met author Jon Ronson, who was writing a book on public shaming, by which time she was unemployed and distraught.
Ronson also met Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old from Massachusetts, who had posed for a photograph at Arlington National Cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns. She was in front of a sign requesting Silence and Respect, so she pretended to scream and flip the bird.
She sent it to a co-worker who put it on Facebook - as the two women had a running joke about photos of them disobeying signs. Four weeks later someone found the photo, and out of context it looked like she was disrespecting the dead. The resulting media firestorm meant she didn't leave her house for a year.
The impact of public shaming is devastating, but there are people for whom becoming a meme has been more of a blessing than a curse. Success Kid was a very early internet meme, featuring a toddler on the beach celebrating a win, and used as a shorthand for unexpected success. His family didn't mind the internet fame, and earlier this year it proved a lifeline.
The child's father is suffering kidney disease and needed to raise $75,000 to fund pre-treatment and a kidney transplant. His wife set up a Go Fund Me page, and the press made the connection between the fundraiser and the child. Fans of the meme got behind the campaign, and by the time the family closed the page they had made $100,165.
