We are well aware that online, we no longer really own our image or images. It’s part of our silent, sacred blood oath with the internet that we try not to think about too much. We know theoretically that at any given moment, our mugs could be pouting back at us from MTV’s Catfish, or we could be reborn as a meme for pulling the wrong face at the right time. Instagram’s terms of use have been a bone of contention since the app’s inception; the platform retains the right to use any picture you upload in its promotional activities, and it can transfer or sub-license this right to its partners. There is an assumption that it’s an issue that comes with a certain level of visibility, but my pictures have been randomly repurposed for several years, long before I had a platform. It is as creepy as it is, admittedly, flattering (I often joke it’s a “photogenic tax”), but what has been most interesting to see has been the narratives and identities projected onto these images. As someone who once switched up their appearance a lot, it’s been fascinating to see how a blue-haired selfie, for instance, has been used both to portray a free-spirited good-time girl on Tinder as well as a militant “woke”, “SJW” on Twitter. And how a picture of me with a Diana Ross-esque wig is so often used for commentary on Black women generally. The context of the images, let alone the person in them, doesn’t matter at all.
It’s something I try not to overthink in order to avoid an overdue panic attack, but this most recent instance made me think about how flippantly we treat image ownership online and how little we think of the original purpose of what we reshare. People using my photo has never been a straightforward case of identity theft – they never pretend to be me, rather use my image as a stock photo of sorts to apply a narrative to. And there is more than one way to steal someone’s face. Sharing memes featuring people against their will might not be as actively sinister as using someone’s face in the hopes of getting laid, but increasingly I think it isn’t as far from it as we might think. In 2016, a picture of smiling 22-month-old Ashton Howell became the “honey bun baby” meme, and while his mother was relatively laidback about his online fame, she begrudged the lack of control over what his image was used for. “The last couple memes I’ve seen, they’ve been a little X-rated,” she said in an interview with Fader. “I don’t want people looking at my baby’s picture and thinking of stuff like that!” Years later, I still see the meme used primarily for jokes about phone sex.