Like many of the tech-adept in the age of social media, Henrico County, Va., mom Ciara Logan is tuned in to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and has enjoyed sharing photos of her three children.
However, all that came to an abrupt end after a complete stranger took photos of her children and captioned them for derogatory memes, CBS 6 reports.
“This has taught me a lesson,” Logan told the news station.
According to CBS 6, Logan, an information technology specialist and the mother of an 8-year-old boy and twin 2-year-old girls, was scrolling through her Instagram when she noticed that a stranger had liked three of her pictures that did not include the children. Curious, she went over to check out his pag, where she saw a photo of her children featured as a meme with a caption declaring, “Harpo just won’t let them girls be.”
Logan said that the photo—which featured her son dressed up in a white suit, with his sisters on either side—was just weeks old.
“To insinuate that my son is a pimp—or that my son is selling cars—because he has on a suit and he has two little girls with him—or to hashtag, ‘Keep him away from those girls,’ as if to say my son is a predator,” she said. “He’s an 8-year-old boy who is very caring, very loving, very nourishing, very protective of his sisters.”
“To have someone display my grandchildren with so much negative connotations and distastefulness … I was just in awe, and it needs to stop,” the children’s grandmother Louise Logan added.
The mother tried to contact the person behind the meme to ask him to remove it, but she said the poster blocked her, made his profile private and then changed his user name.
She reached out to Instagram to see what could be done and was told to remove the photos of her children—all of them—to prevent future episodes.
Logan now keeps her Instagram postings under lock and key and urges parents to be cautious when posting photos of their children. “Share them with the ones you love via text message,” Logan warned. “Get a page that is for family only, and private your page.”
Read more at CBS 6.