When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, he used a photo of actor Al Pacino to represent his vision. (Who wouldn’t want to be friends with Michael Corleone/Tony Montana/Jack Kevorkian?) As of yesterday, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel may wish he’d done the same.
Back in 2011, Spiegel and Snapchat co-founder Robert Murphy asked sisters Sarah and Elizabeth Turner — 18 and 19 years old at the time — to pose for some photos at a beach, according to their new lawsuit against the company, as TMZ originally reported (with the classy-as-always headline, “YOU MADE US WHORE FACES”). The sisters signed a model release, they say, but didn’t ask for any money because it was just a quick favor to help with a “class project.”
Related: 27 SnapChats That Perfectly Explain College
So, what’s the problem? They didn’t realize Spiegel’s and Murphy’s Stanford homework assignment (a Snapchat predecessor called Picaboo) would eventually become the world’s most popular d–k pic delivery system.
Being associated with the application has permanently “tainted” the sisters’ reputation, the lawsuit claims, especially since they show up in Google results for “the offensive slur ‘snapchat sluts.’” (Pro tip: You DON’T wanna do a Google image search for that phrase at work.)
This lawsuit might not help on that front — it’s likely to create a bunch of headlines with their names and “Snapchat sluts” — but you have to admit, showing someone’s photo to your teacher is a lot different than showing it to millions of people for billions of dollars years later. Just one more reminder that (as “The Social Network” put it) the internet is written in ink, not in pencil — even when that ink is supposed to become invisible after six seconds.
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