136: Sarah's arrest photo went viral

Content warning – this episode includes discussion of drug use and suicide.

For anyone who creates online content, the big goal is to have your content go viral.

Whether it’s a Tiktok or YouTube video, an Instagram reel, or a Facebook photo – when something goes viral, the person who posted it is kind of quasi-famous for a few days or a week.

This happened to me once, several years ago. I posted a video on Facebook, and it just took off like crazy. It wasn’t even a video that I created personally. But people saw it and shared it, so it was seen by millions of people – right on my Facebook profile page. So I was getting hundreds of friends requests every day from people I didn’t know (and I declined all of them, of course). It was kind of fun, but also a little weird that suddenly my Facebook page was being viewed by so many people, all over the world.

But for some people, having their photo go viral is not a good thing. That’s what happened with my guest today, Sarah. She got in trouble for selling drugs. This was her first time ever being arrested, and she made the mistake of smiling for her booking photo. That’s when things got crazy, and she was nicknamed in the press as the “Adorable Drug Kingpin”.

The other reason this story went viral was because of where Sarah’s dad worked. His employer was the Drug Enforcement Agency. Sarah’s dad was a DEA agent.

If you’d like to contact Sarah, her email is empathy.always1@gmail.com

Show notes for this episode:

https://WhatWasThatLike.com/136

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