Disney actress Skai Jackson on what it's like to be turned into a meme

'When I first saw the meme, I honestly didn’t understand why people were making memes of me'

Skai Jackson (Getty Images )

One of the most underestimated risks around social media concerns the trajectory a photo could actually have.

Thousands of unsuspecting people have watched as their innocent pictures appear all over social feeds across the world by others gleefully using them in a very different context to the one intended.

This is something the Disney actress Skai Jackson recently became familiar with, and something Azealia Banks was quick to mock her for.

Skai had found herself suddenly transformed into a meme in April after sharing a picture of herself before an appearance on Fox 5 to promote her new show, Bunk’D.

She incurred the rapper’s wrath by telling her to simmer down after Banks directed racial slurs at Zayn Malik. In her response, Banks attacked Skai and her mother, dismissing her as nothing more than a meme.

The meme in question simply showed the 14-year-old sitting with her hand across her knee, yet was shared with captions such as: “When he keep telling you, you’re not his girlfriend, but you are.”

But Skai says she is unfazed by being turned into a meme.

“When I first saw the meme, I honestly didn’t understand why people were making memes of me,” she told the Huffington Post. “I was like ‘What’s so funny about this? There’s so many memes going on.’ Then I was going through them and they’re actually really funny. I don’t know who created these but they actually did a pretty good job because it makes me laugh and I took no offence to it and that’s why I posted it on my Instagram and Twitter. It’s just really funny, and I have a good sense of humour. So I just thought, ‘oh wow, that’s cool now that I’m a meme and I’m on like all social media pages, on Twitter 24/7.’

“And even people approach me, like different actresses and actors, they come up to me like ‘I see you on my Instagram page like 24/7.’"