Mom tries to Facebook-shame daughter, gets pizza on face
A mother makes her daughter pose for a picture to prove that it will travel far and wide on the Web. She ends up getting prank calls, pizza deliveries and a lesson for herself.
Some parents believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a Facebook post for a Facebook post.
Children, they think, sometimes need to learn lessons the hard way. Because the power of the hard way hasn't yet been disrupted by the clever young people in Silicon Valley.
In order to teach her 12-year-old that she was too young to have Facebook and Instagram accounts, Kira Hudson from Colorado made her pose with a sign that read: "Mom is trying to show me how many people can see a picture once it's on the internet."
The picture was accompanied by these words from mom: "My 12-year-old daughter doesn't understand why she can't have an Instagram or Facebook account...Please 'like and Share'...She just doesn't get it!"
Oh, and just to prove how much she doesn't get it, as The Huffington Post reports, mom posted it on the Internet's loudest bulletin board: Facebook.
This isn't the first time that a parent has tried to use social media to shame a child.
An Ohio mom, Denise Abbott, posted a Facebook picture of her daughter with a red cross over her mouth.
And who could forget Tommy Jordan, the man who made a YouTube video of himself shooting his daughter's laptop dead?
Just as that video prompted a visit from child protection services, Hudson's Facebook posting had interesting consequences too.
The picture traveled far and wide, including to Facebook pages such as Southern Mama, which enjoys the description: "A page for mama's and daddy to talk about what we talk about kids, men and women, pride, god, music whatever. DRAMA FREE!!! KEEP IT AT THE DOOR."
Drama free, indeed.
Then, as The Daily Dot reports, members of the /b/ imageboard at 4Chan used their wits in an attempt to discover Hudson's Facebook page, address, phone number.
Soon, different -- and some less pleasant -- versions of the photo began to circulate. Then pizzas were delivered to Hudson's address. Or at least what the 4Chan members thought was her address.
The photo has now been removed from Hudson's Facebook page, but not before it enjoyed almost 1 million Likes. However, she admitted to The Huffington Post that this had not all gone quite to plan.
She said that she was glad that her attempt at humiliating her daughter had helped other parents teach their children about the Web.
She admitted, though: "It certainly opened my eyes to the fact that I thought my own private Facebook was secure. It was not as secure as I thought. Luckily for us, the information that was gathered by others was not my current residence or phone number."
Clearly, she hadn't received the memo about people wanting to share more all the time and Facebook, um, facilitating that sharing.
She also apologized to the family who now lives at the address that 4Chan obtained, and she promised to send them a pizza.
Through it all, though, one 4Chan poster might also have offered a useful tip. He or she posted the picture, with this caption: "Maybe you shouldn't use your daughter as an experiment to prove your point...Just an idea."
Mom's intention had been to spread her daughter's picture and humiliation as far and wide as possible. She had even encouraged anyone who saw it to "click on the picture, and then hit 'Share' and change the setting to 'public.'"
This way, she thought she'd get a clear reading on how many people would witness the shaming.
It didn't quite work out that way. Shame, that.