How Did Social Media React To Meghan Lane Morrison Leaked Photo?

For a few days it was hard to scroll through social media without seeing the issue of a private image of a woman being shared without her consent splashed across your screen in every color of the outraged, the sad, theindhignant and the morbidly curious. There were screenshots of the image in question shared with many a hot take on how it happened and by who, often long before the facts had been checked. Some people treated the leaking of the image as they would a breaking news story, others immediately began to share why we shouldn’t be sharing the image at all. Writers, influencers and journalists of all stripes weighed in at various points along the way,urging platforms to remove the images and in some cases going as far as to call for the in sleeves of the images to be legally pursued. Throughout, #SupportPrivacy and #DontShare.ItMakesNoDiffernce/etc would regularly trend as people sought to support the woman in question and speculate about her identity.

There were so many threads on the issue of consent to share the images, with privacy advocates and feminists alike organizing to post blackout recreate the post and links, as well as information on legal recourse and mental health hotlines. There were however other threads that took a very bad turn and began to blame the victim of the leaked images for the photos having been taken in the first place. There were even a handful of individuals who seemed to treat the leak of the extremely personal images as some kind of dirty anecdote to use against an entirely unrelated third party. Moderation on the platforms and the reporting process was another huge point of contention for many users. Was it enough to take down the original post? Did the platforms have a sufficient process in place to remove all mirrors of the post? How could tech companies be expected to prevent the images from being rapidly re-uploaded by users across the web? Lawyers and other commentators spelled out the possible routes of action that the affected individual could take to deal with the leake, including copyright and possibly even statutory protection against the non-consensual distribution of the images. Amazingly, within hours of the leak, there were even a number of grass-roots fundraisers sprouting up to help pay for the individual’s legal bills, as well as for their counseling needs.

This sparks a lot of anger and sadness, mostly because it is clear that there are a lot of people who care about a person’s privacy and would like to support them. There are lots of messages, a privacy legal fund has been set up to which people are donating, and lots of messages of support for education on the topic of consent. It is also really great to see this influencing debate around digital literacy – how we treat screenshots of other people, why sharing non-consensual images of somebody is not only horrible but also potentially illegal, and how our social norms around sharing images of other people need to evolve to match the technology that we are using. I really hope that the noise around this leads to better policies and more empathy in the long run, but until then I’m going to keep rooting for respect over clicks.

So, this sparked up a fairly in-depth discussion in my feeds about “manufactured scandals” and the culture of influencing. People analyzed the photo and speculated about the timing and the aesthetic, wondering about possible motives. Was this a desperate attempt to remain relevant? A failed attempt at a “hacked” and therefore more interesting photo? The story was analyzed at a lot of different levels and the upshot was that social media not only consumed this story, it also attempted to reverse-engineer the PR behind it and found it to be fairly transparent. The discussion was therefore highly analytical and cynical, treating the whole thing as a fascinating, and failed, case study of personal brand management in the digital age.

This image was incredibly fascinating to watch evolve in real-time. Initial posts on the matter were asking if this was real and whether Khloe was hacked. Within the hour or so, the usual forensics crowd that pops up in situations like these (i.e. actually observant and good at what they do) had concluded that this was a fabrication of some sort. And within another hour or so, the shift had taken a hard turn to derision. The next day a slew of think-pieces emerged that declared the death of scandal in the age of the influencer. Social media doesn’t have one reaction to something like this, it has a number of reactions that unfold in incredibly short order. This image in particular served as a great test case for how quickly an online crowd can dissect, judge and re-purpose an image and how that image will be dictated in terms of lifespan and true meaning.

TikTok and Instagram Reels tended to accelerate the trend to its peak and then to its demise within hours to be supplanted by another parody. By the time the usual news outlets got round to writing the ‘how social media reacted’ article, the social media’s reaction to the event in question had already moved on to five other things. In terms of an image being used as material for engagement, such was often mere ephemera, and it was grasped in this manner and then immediately discarded in the content mill. Reactions are increasingly transient and are used for but a moment as if to offer some utility.