The epic catfishing of Manti Te'o continues to befuddle the nation. 23-year-old Los Angeles woman Diane O'Meara, whose photographs were now infamously appropriated by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo as an avatar for the nonexistent "Lennay Kekua," wrote a piece in the L.A. Times where she basically just does this. And who can blame her?
I thought I had been careful with the privacy settings on my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I kept up with Facebook's privacy policies and took advantage of privacy tools. My private profile was not searchable by anyone who was not a "friend of a friend." I even limited access to photos of me that were posted by other people and tagged on my profile. And I made sure that every post and tag that was on my timeline was there because I allowed it to be there.
O'Meara explains that Tuiasosopo, an acquaintance from her high school, took a variety of photos off of her Facebook page without her knowledge (obviously), and eventually contacted her for personalized shots, plying her with a sob story:
In a series of increasingly frantic messages in December, he asked me to get in touch with him, saying, "It's an emergency" and assuring me "I'm not hitting on you." [...] When I finally did make contact, he told me that he was trying to cheer up his cousin, who'd been nearly killed in a car accident and was awaiting surgery for head trauma.
She has since shut down her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but says that it's "a temporary solution" and she'll eventually return to the Interwebz.
'Through social media, a launch into the Manti Te'o scandal' [L.A. Times]