User:Vchimpanzee/Disaster Girl

Disaster Girl is an Internet meme based on a photo of Zoe Roth at age 4 taken in Mebane, North Carolina in January 2005. The Roth family lived near a fire station and as they watched a house being burned for training, Zoe's father took her picture as she smiled in a way that suggested she had started the fire and was happy about it. The photo became famous in 2008 when it won an Emotion Capture contest in JPG magazine. The magazine Wired UK later called the girl "one of a small number of people whose faces came to define mainstream internet culture in the early-2010s". After that, the photo was edited so that Zoe appeared as part of various disasters including a meteor causing the extinction of dinosaurs or the sinking of the Titanic. Zoe had given permission to use the image in educational material, but the photo had been used hundreds of times for various purposes without the Roths having control. After receiving an email in February 2021 suggesting she sell the meme as an NFT for as much as "six figures", Roth decided to sell the original copy. Ben Lashes, who managed numerous memes, said sales of these as NFTs had made $2 million and established memes as serious art. The first memes were sold as NFTs through auctions in 2021.. On April 17, 2021, Zoe sold the photo, now an NFT, for the equivalent of US$486,716 to a collector identified only as @3FMusic. This allowed the family control over the image's distribution and gives them copyright and 10 percent of proceeds when the NFT is sold.