Choosing evidence over shame
Woman fights for justice after stolen photo is sexualized online
It was a single photograph meant to capture a milestone. Six former college roommates, reunited in the humid air of Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, in September 2023, were celebrating five years of friendship since graduation.
But within weeks, that image — originally shared on the social media platform Xiaohongshu — was weaponized. A creator known as "Business Tycoon" on short-video app Douyin stole the photo, added a digital price tag, and broadcast it to 330,000 followers with a provocative caption: "The bride price is 100,000 yuan. Which one would you choose as a girlfriend?"
This was the beginning of a traumatic yearlong fight for Xiaoting (a pseudonym) and the other women in the photograph to get multiple defamatory posts taken down, and for the person who posted them to be held accountable.
This was achieved in September 2024 when the Guangzhou Internet Court ordered a social media creator, identified by the surname Luo, to pay damages and issue a public apology for using a stolen graduation photo to fabricate a viral "bride price" rumor.
Sudden shock
Xiaoting was first made aware of the malicious post after an online acquaintance messaged her.
She immediately searched on Douyin and was shocked by what she found. Many of the comments actually entertained the text that accompanied the photo.
The comments read like bids. "I'm not picky," one person wrote. "Give me any." "Packaged deal," another said. "I'll marry all six — can't bear to split the sisters up."
"We had such a beautiful photo, and it got turned into this. It was absurd," Xiaoting said.
She messaged the creator and demanded deletion, generously assuming it might be a misunderstanding.
The following weekend, however, the post was still up, this time with other variations. In one version, the poster had numbered the women "first sister" through "sixth sister" and repeated the bride-price hook. Many commenters kept picking favorites as if the women were for sale.
Xiaoting and her friends flooded his inbox and the comment section, asking for deletion. The poster ignored them.
Scrolling through the page, they saw it wasn't personal. The poster had recycled other women's photos the same way, using sexual rumors as bait to attract traffic. The account also sold household goods.
It later transpired that the poster also ran a "dating fans group" and had again used Xiaoting's photo as the group avatar. The women joined the group to clarify that the story was fabricated, but were immediately kicked out and blocked.
They reported the video. The platform replied with a template saying it couldn't confirm infringement or that Xiaoting was the rights holder. Reports elsewhere went nowhere, too. Even after posts were taken down, the poster faced no visible consequences.
The photo and similar comments continued, and eventually spilled over into the real world.
One of the women in the photo was teased at work, with a colleague asking, "Are you recruiting a husband online?"
Xiaoting received messages too, half-joking and half-serious. "You want a 100,000 yuan bride price?" She kept explaining, again and again, that it wasn't her post.
The group faced significant emotional distress, with some members expressing a sense of shame over the original photo, despite the court later ruling they were the victims of rights infringement.
Xiaoting decided to file a report with the police. After hearing her, an officer told her that, in his opinion, the posts had not caused "substantial harm", and the case could not be opened, according to Xiaoting.
Using a different account, Xiaoting messaged the poster again and told him she had reported him. This time, he replied. "Sorry, I deleted it," he wrote, claiming he had copied the photo from another user's post on a search engine.
She told him that just deleting the photo didn't erase the multiple posts he'd already made.
His response seemed to imply he was being inconvenienced, according to Xiaoting.
"He didn't think he'd done anything wrong," she said.






























