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.

Legal action

That was when she began thinking about deterrence. She decided to sue.

At first, she tried to file on her own, but struggled with complexities and paperwork. She then decided to hire a lawyer, who suggested that the case would be stronger if the group sued together. Four of the six women agreed and became the plaintiffs.

The lawyer told them to collect as much evidence as possible, especially proof of cross-platform spread and impact. Xiaoting had screenshots and recordings. What she didn't have was reach. The photo had traveled into places she couldn't follow.

That's where strangers helped. After she posted about what happened, people online sent what they could find — copies, traces, proof the image had traveled.

"They told us not to give up," Xiaoting said, speaking about the netizens who came out in support of her case.

From the beginning, the defendant, identified as Luo in the judgment, refused to cooperate. The court couldn't reach him directly and had to rely on a public notice to serve him. A hearing scheduled for May was pushed to June 5, and Luo did not appear.

"If we hadn't insisted, it would have had almost no impact on him," Xiaoting said.

The case attracted media coverage and that helped to clarify that Xiaoting's claims were not fabricated.

In November 2023, Douyin finally banned the creator's account and cleared the videos. In the days before the ban, Luo had still been posting and selling products through the account.

In September 2024, the Guangzhou Internet Court issued a judgment finding that Luo had infringed the plaintiffs' portrait and reputation rights. It ordered a written apology and awarded 12,000 yuan ($1,740) in compensation.

After the ruling, Xiaoting wrote a guide and pinned it to the top of her Xiaohongshu profile, telling people what to do if a photo is stolen, sexualized and turned into a rumor; how to preserve evidence, report posts and find a lawyer.

The advice she repeats most is about shame. Don't delete the original post. Don't erase what you'll later need to prove. "The wrong isn't us," she wrote.

The case is one of many that have come to public attention in recent years, signaling that more action is needed to protect people's rights and safety in cyberspace.

One high-profile case in 2022 saw 23-year-old Zheng Linghua become the target of severe cyberbullying after posting a photo of herself with pink hair while visiting her grandfather's hospital bed to share her graduate school admission letter. Malicious rumors fabricated from the image — falsely claiming she was a "nightclub girl" involved in a relationship with an elderly man — and led to a prolonged period of online harassment that ultimately resulted in her death by suicide in early 2023.

For Xiaoting, her case was a warning about how far this kind of humiliation can go when no one pushes back. "Don't do something irreversible," she said.

What she wanted, in the end, was to make the cost visible. "You have to deter them," she said. "Doing something bad isn't solved by deleting."

The compensation still hasn't arrived, but Xiaoting doesn't linger on it. She doesn't want the lesson to collapse into discouragement. The judgment, she believes, has already changed something — turning a private contamination into a public wrong.

After the ordeal, the roommates' friendship has only gotten stronger. When the money finally comes, they plan to celebrate with a big meal. And when they can line up time off again, they'll travel together, dress up and take beautiful photos. They refuse to let the mean-spirited actions of others be the reason they stop.

"I want people to know this," Xiaoting said. "Don't think hiding behind a keyboard means you can do anything."