Protecting Sully

West Ashley resident Jennifer Jones-Wood found out the day after the presidential election that supporters of Donald Trump had used a picture of her daughter in a disgusting meme.
She and Sullivan, now 5, were at a play-date with another mother-daughter duo when she got a text message that drove her to the web.
There, a picture of Sullivan posing with her idol, Hillary Clinton, when she was still 4 years old had been taken and emblazoned with a horrible message and sent all over the country.
“I felt like I had been punched in the gut — but the kids were there so I had to make myself not react, to make myself go numb until I got Sully home, fed, bathed, and in bed, and then I could absorb what I saw,” says Jones-Wood.
“It was disgusting and I was in disbelief, horrified. I started to cry, and then I got angry, with ‘How dare they,’ shouting in my head,” she recounts while waiting for her daughter to finish class at a West Ashley ballet school last week.
(Readers: you are on your own as to the content of the meme. This is a family paper, a community paper. At least one major newspaper included the content. West Of won’t, it’s that bad. Suffice it to say it was a misogynistic, sexist, exploitative, and, xenophobic.)
Jones-Wood soon traced the picture to a social media group that supported Trump, which removed the image after her friends rallied and demanded electronically that it be taken down. But that was only the first step of the battle.
The image had been shared, pinned, re-tweeted all over the Internet to literally thousands of places. Jones-Wood works overnight at a downtown hotel so she can be more present in her daughter’s life during the day.
Next Sunday morning, when Jones-Wood skipped sleep to go teach Sunday School, she received inspiration during the second service. She contacted Pantsuit Nation, a Hillary Clinton Facebook organization and asked members across the country to help scrub the Internet clean of the image by asking all the sites they could find to take it down.
Shaun Kozolchyk, Director of Development — Central Pacific for the Anti-Defamation League,  responded to Jones-Wood plea for help.
Jones-Wood felt Kozolchyk , also a mother, was speaking her language and reached out. The executive soon put her in contact with Jonathan Vick, the director of the ADL’s Cyberhate Response office in New York City.
The ADL was founded in 1913 “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” and is focused on the fair treatment and civil rights of all people.
Vick, with 14 years experience, quickly surmised that the photo actually belonged to Clinton’s presidential campaign. That meant whoever used the image could only do so with the campaigns permission, due to copyright law.
Vick praised Clinton’s campaign for taking an active part in getting the meme shut down. In past instances, he says major organizations have left it up to his office to act on their behalf.
The campaign, Vick said, took it upon itself to help protect a kid who turns six on Christmas Day.
“The trick is to get the original few posts to take down the image, that way many of the subsequent links just disappear,” says Vick.
And that’s what happened in this instance. Pretty quickly and pretty effectively, the links disappeared, and only serious Internet sleuths can track down the original meme.
Jones-Wood, who appeared on CNN last week, notes the irony that an image that spread virally, was taken down almost as fast via viral methods. And that was a good thing, too.
“Hillary Clinton is Sully’s hero,” says Jones-Wood, adding that on top of having met Clinton enough times that the former presidential candidate calls her by name, Sully went as Clinton for Halloween.
Vick warned Jones-Wood like he warns his own teen daughter, that no image is permanently gone on the Internet. “If it shows up again, we’ll just have to roll up our sleeves and get to work again,” he says.