Do you like sharing memes? We all always laugh, and some people are even creating new ones every day, but behind a meme there are real people with real lives.
Heidi Yeh was a rising model until a malicious advertisement became one of the biggest “Fake News” stories in history.
In 2012, Heidi accepted a modeling job for a cosmetic surgery clinic in Taiwan. The idea was simple: a family photo with the slogan
“The only thing you’ll have to explain to your children is this.” What Heidi didn’t know was that that photo shoot would become her professional death sentence.
The world believed that she had had surgery on her entire face, that the man in the photo was her real husband, that he had sued her for millions of dollars after discovering that she had had her whole face operated on before meeting him, thus “explaining” why the children didn’t look like their parents and were “so ugly.”
But the truth was different; the children were edited with Photoshop to look different (really ugly) and the story about the lawsuit was a cruel invention of the internet. Heidi lost contracts, her family questioned her, and she fell into a deep depression. 💔😭 “I can’t sleep, I just cry,” she confessed at the time.
Today, Heidi raises her voice to warn about the destructive power of memes and online harassment.