Mommy bloggers beware.
Mother of two Meredith Steele, 35, is warning parents to stop sharing photos of their children online after her family was “digitally kidnapped.”
The terrifying phenomenon occurs when a stranger steals a parent’s social media snaps to use on their own accounts and live out a fake life online.
“My kids had new names and new identities,” Steele said of the ordeal. “They [the culprit] had made their own captions and made their own lives. It was like they were playing with Barbie dolls but the dolls were my kids.
“This changed my mind about sharing my stuff online,” the Maine mama told South West News Service. “Mommy blog culture normalizes oversharing intimate personal details of your kids and they aren’t old enough to agree or disagree with it.”
Steele realized her kids had been digitally kidnapped in June 2021, when she was out at dinner celebrating her child’s preschool graduation. At the time, she snapped a sweet picture of her family and posted it to Instagram.
After the meal, a family friend who worked at the restaurant noticed two photos of the family tagged to the eatery’s Instagram account — but one wasn’t posted by Steele.
The friend contacted Steele to let her know her family’s photos were being reshared on a separate account by a stranger who had made up their own fictional family with the mom’s real-life images.
“It was absolutely horrifying,” Steele recalled, claiming the imposter account had taken nearly 30 of her photos and built their own following of thousands by writing fake captions about special family memories.
“These people have an emotional investment in my family,” the mom stated. “I don’t know who it was… [but] it was a real violation.”
Investigations into digital kidnapping found that the majority of those participating are teenage girls and young women using the photos to roleplay in a virtual game of make-believe motherhood.
The legality of digital kidnapping is not clear cut but could result in a real cybercrime such as the identity theft of the child.
Steele — who constantly shared photos of her family and their daily lives on her public Instagram page — reported the fake account but the social media company failed to take action. The mom was eventually forced to block the account.
“I felt like such a bad parent,” she lamented, admitting that she had no concept of internet safety when she started sharing snaps of her young kids.
“I learned this the hard way,” she warned in a viral TikTok video about the digital kidnapping. “It might sound dramatic — until it’s your kids.”
Steele has maintained her large social media following with 923,200 TikTok followers and 157,000 Instagram followers but has since removed all photos of her children’s faces from social media and makes sure to only tag her location hours after she’s left a spot.
The mother has now forbidden her children from having their own social media accounts and no longer grants permission for school and summer camps to take photographs of the kids.
Meanwhile, research has found that 92% of American children have some type of online presence by the time they are 2 years old.
But while many people love to overshare personal details of their children’s lives online, Steele is encouraging them to rethink so that they don’t have to go through what she did.
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“I want to protect other people from feeling like that,” she declared. “These little kids can’t consent to be on that level of exposure.
“You will never see my kid’s faces on my social media again,” the mortified mama continued, before adding that the experience has helped her to “have healthier boundaries” when it comes to social media.