I (27f) have a girl (age unknown) on IG who followed me from bumble bff a few years back when I joined after moving to a new area. She followed me first and we’ve just casually liked each other’s posts here and there ever since but we’ve never spoken or had any interactions.
I’m scrolling IG today and she’s posted a photo carousel to her main feed, I’m flicking through them and I come across a picture I took of a specific place and added to my story highlights back in 2023 and it’s been there ever since, she screenshotted the exact picture and posted it to her page today as if it’s her own and she took it, knowing good and well we follow each other and Im going to see it? It took me back a little and I do think it’s odd given that you have to go quite far back on my highlights and flick through 10’s of other pictures before you get to this particular one.. however seeing as it’s not my face or anything about me directly I thought it’s not like she’s trying to catfish me so I looked past it initially. But I looked back at her other posts and she’s done it a fair few times with other pictures from my stories with some of them being from highlights that are still on my page and others being ones that were just up for 24 hours, meaning she was screenshotting as I was uploading them and waiting for months or in this case even years later to post.
Again each one is not of me or anything that identifies me, it’s just views, locations and activities I would do so it’s harmless I guess but I still feel like it’s just a strange thing to do. Some of my things that she’s posted are even from before i moved to this place and before I made the bumble profile meaning she’s purposely gone back that far, for context i moved from an entirely separate country so she’s even making posts pretending to be abroad using my pictures from places I would go in my small hometown back in my country from when i was a teenager and was last there..
I told my friends and some of them think it’s funny/harmless and I should either ignore it or just block her, but others have planted a seed of doubt in my head that this could be quite dangerous? In terms of stalking or catfishing to a deeper extent down the line and that I should say something to her. My thing is I can’t force her to remove anything and where we’ve never interacted I don’t know if this girl is hostile or vulnerable or what and the last thing I want is to embarrass or aggravate someone who might possibly have a ton of my pictures already saved, as just because she’s not posting the ones of my face doesn’t mean she’s not using them elsewhere. Ignoring her and blocking her doesn’t take my pictures down from her page and doing nothing at all allows it to continue and who knows how far it could go? Essentially I want to know if im being too relaxed and my friends are right in being cautious about this and it’s worth confronting, or is it just not that serious at all and I should just leave it alone?
My guess is you are making this deeper than it is.
No you wouldn’t be TA if you confronted her. In fact it will help you to stop speculation about what might happen with possible other screenshots at some point somehow.
You or some of your friends are overthinking this imho.
In a simple message, request that she remove and delete all of your images. If she doesn’t, ask IG to remove them. It should be clear from posting dates that she got them from you.
She’s wrong to post them as her own, but the truth is once you post something online, including pictures of yourself, anyone can use them, alter them, or post them for any purpose. Not necessarily legally, but they can do it. If you ever have pictures that you don’t want shared across the internet, don’t post them on the internet.
This is the golden path answer
NTA Yup, request a delete, tell her the behavior is weird if that part matters to you, block her and move on with your life.
It’s weird, but it doesn’t sound like she’s getting into dangerous territory. If it makes you uncomfortable (which is not unreasonable), why not just block her?
NAH, I guess, but she is being weird.
NTA, but I think you’re spending too much effort on this. Since you don’t actually know her, unfollow and block. Problem solved.
weirdly, I’ve actually experienced this. The girl ended up being like, 13 or 14– she thought I was cool and wanted to emulate me I guess, but it got a bit obsessive and uncomfortable after a while. But she was messaging me a lot and getting upset if I didn’t reply, which isn’t happening here, so it’s sort of hard to say? I would just politely ask her to take your pictures down (you can delete images from an Instagram carousel without taking the whole post down now) and to not use your images going forward because it makes you feel a bit weird. NTA
I’ll give this a NTA, since I don’t think you would be an a-hole to confront it, but I do think it would be unwise. The behaviour you’re describing is what people with really low self-esteem do. Not all people with low self-esteem are dangerous, but there is a type of dangerous person that is motivated by their own self-loathing to take it out on others. She might be this kind of person, and confronting her might cause her to escalate.
NTA. What she’s doing is illegal as you have the copyright for any photos you have taken. She may not realise what she’s doing is illegal so you should contact her, point out that the photos were posted without your permission and ask her to remove them. If she doesn’t, block her and report her to IG for copyright infringement. It’s probably safest to block her in any case so she doesn’t have further access to your photos.
Shes a stalker. Put your IG name as a watermark in your photos so no one can steal them.