It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Sued

We have all seen the Michael Jordan Crying Face memes on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I recently saw an article from ESPN.com about the possibility of getting sued over using MJ in one of his most emotional times. Getting straight to the point, you won't get sued for retweeting this meme,but Michael Jordan or the original photographer (Associated Press) could try to sue if they wanted to, but  have real problems to deal with.

There was a recent case with Dancing with Stars' Val Chmerkovskiy. He shared a meme of a little girl in hopes to get a conversation started about childhood obesity. Well he got a conversation started alright. While the sister of the little girl was on Facebook she saw the image and was obviously upset that someone had posted this image of her little sister and made it into a meme. The photo was taken without the knowledge of the little girls' family in 2008 and the family decided to sue Val for $6 million dollars for defamation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy for making the meme go viral. The original photographer on the other hand is only being sued for $600,000. This doesn't seem fair considering the meme has been around since 2014.

Though he did not create the meme, he shared it and is still receiving a lot of heat about it from social media followers. It turns out the little girl has Down Syndrome which makes it all worse, but there was no way for him or anyone else to know that. It does not make it right, but I don't think he should be sued for millions of dollars for posting an image that he did not create and did not have malice intentions on the little girl. From a PR perspective I would have told  him not to  do it from the beginning, but sometimes people do things that they should have thought twice about. He apologized and the case is ongoing.

Memes are a big trend in social media and they don't seem to be going away for a while. They can be made from anything from an athlete to a popular event to a regular person. Most users have shared  these images and don't think about how it can affect the person that the image is about. Most are harmless, but some can be harmful. Continue to share the funny ones about celebrities, but stay away from the ones with people like you and me. It's all in fun until someone gets sued!