Our protagonist has an influencer friend who runs a mommy blog. She intentionally let her friend repost a meme that made her look like an idiot. Now her friend is mad at her. Who is the a-hole?
A woman, who we will call Nadia, took to reddit to share a situation that got her in hot water with her influencer friend. Who do you think is in the wrong here?
“I feel kind of bad, but I have a friend who thinks of herself as a highly popular mom influencer (she’s in her 40s), and she has a habit of taking other people’s posts, memes, etc and reposting them as her own.
She even steals personal, heartfelt words from other bloggers and Instagrammers about their struggles with body image, depression, etc and slightly changes them to repost as her own. She’s grown a decent following from this and gets sponsored by brands for “keeping it real.”
Honestly, I’ll admit part of me is likely jealous, so I’ll own that, but mostly I just think it’s gross that she is lying and making up a whole personality that has people thinking she’s something she’s not.”
“Anyway, there’s this challenge going around on social media called the Hidden Cat Challenge, and I thought it would be funny to send her a photo of Monica’s apartment from Friends and say, “Bet you can’t find the cat in this photo.” I figured she’d recognize it and laugh, but within a few minutes, she had posted it on all of her social media telling people it was her latest Air B&B and making up an elaborate backstory about a random cat that lived there and challenging people to find it.
I messaged her asking why she would lie, and she just said that she needed content and ‘no one would ever know.'”
“So I just kept my mouth shut and sat back to see what would happen. Obviously people immediately began calling her out, and she tried to defend herself, but it wasn’t long before she took it down and had to turn off comments on all her social accounts.
She’s now telling me I’m an a-hole for letting her post it, and I may have cost her sponsors and taken food out of her kids mouths. Am I the jerk?
Just to clarify – I had no idea she was going to post it. The whole point was that the photo didn’t even have a cat in it… It was a joke. She posted it with a whole fake story AND tried to make people find the non-existent cat in the photo, which added hugely to her embarrassment. After she got mad, I even tried to help by suggesting she simply tell people she accidentally posted the wrong photo or even say it was a joke, but she locked down her profiles, which obviously made her look bad. None of our friends blame me, but she is seriously upset and is refusing to speak to me. I never intended to make her look bad, but since she brushed me off when I first called her out, I figured I’d just let it play out. I guess that is why she thinks I’m the jerk.”
Who do you think is in the wrong here, the influencer friend who lied about the backstory of the photo or the woman who didn’t do anything to stop her?