Radio host and baby mama Fifi Box is irate because an overseas company has started using her photograph to sell weight loss pills on Facebook. Even more shockingly, they’ve included photographs of Fifi’s baby daughter, Trixie, without her permission.
This morning on Fox FM’s Fifi and Dave show, Fifi went on a spectacular rant about exploitation, body image and a worldwide diet pills scam. She also revealed that she has contacted Facebook to complain and is looking into suing the company involved. The only reason Fifi knows about her image being used is because it started popping up on her friends’ news feeds.
She didn’t spot it herself because she doesn’t have a personal FB account.
“See, because I don’t have a personal Facebook account, I don’t see this, so I keep getting people Tweeting me or contacting me saying, ‘Hey, how are you going with those diet pills?'” she explained on air this morn.
“Now, one, I don’t promote diet pills. I think they’re disgusting. I think that…I am so inherently against what they represent…It’s so infuriating to me that a company is blatantly illegally using my image and one of the photos they use is one they’ve grabbed of me with Trixie.”
Co-host Dave Thornton sounded truly bewildered, adding that he thought the whole thing was “very gross”.
According to Fifi, a “dodgy URL in Panama” is using her photos and she can’t find a way to stop them. “Now what’s really bad about this though Dave is that I can’t get it stopped. So I’ve attempted legally to see what the…how I can go about suing these people or having the posts stopped. I’ve also approached Facebook numerous times to say can you ‘please, please take these posts down’ because it’s not nice when your name is used for something you don’t agree or don’t want to align yourself to…”
She used the opportunity to air her concerns about an industry that coaxes young women into using pills like these by aligning them with a face they trust.
Here’s the rest of her rant:
“But I get worried about girls and women particularly who are seeing this and thinking “Oh Fifi tried this, I trust her, I’m going to try it”. That’s…I am mortified at the idea that women are buying these diet pills thinking that I’ve endorsed them. I haven’t and I never would, and what’s interesting is that Facebook clearly can’t do anything about it or won’t, and I don’t understand that because you can report abuse, you can stop people using your image, but I can’t stop a company in Panama…and also, they’re bombarding your news feeds because my dad the other day went ‘Oh I saw you’re flogging these new diet pills’. Dad come on mate, you know me better than that! Dad…
And this is the thing. It would cost me hundreds of thousands to try and track down these guys overseas who are flooding Facebook. Why Facebook can’t stop it is another thing and clearly…I’d love to hear back from them, because I don’t know why someone’s allowed to illegally promote this, and it’s detrimental to the health of women and girls that see those posts, and I hate that.”
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Top Comments
two things bother me about this 1) she is ALL OVER twitter and instagram with her daughter, I have no problems with that per say but she is a public face and surely she didn't think those images were private
2) isn't she flogging some low carb bar? those things are full or sugar and really bad for you.
She doesn't deserve this and its scary how easily it happens but people need to stop being amazed and horrified when their things are taken off the internet and used without their knowledge. surely we are passed this ignorance?
They were doing it to Magda Szubanski too. So wrong! I and many others reported it too facebook as fake pages (they were sponsored pages popping up on facebook) and they did NOTHING! I hope Fifi wins this battle and can beat the scum who do this.