Taylor Jordan was in Miami recently for spring break with some friends when a random encounter with a stranger made her the subject of an even more random viral tweet.
Jordan, 21, told BuzzFeed News she and her friends were partying in South Beach when a stranger approached them and offered them shots.
They got into a friendly conversation and the man said he knew of some parties in the area later that night, she said.
He asked for Jordan's number so he could text her about them.
"I gave him my phone number, and following that he asked if he could take a picture with me, and I was, like, I guess," she said, laughing. Here's that photo — the man identified himself as 21-year-old Fred Young, who then later texted the photo to Jordan.
"The nature of the meeting was nowhere near sexual — it was friendly and very typical of the encounters had during spring break," she explained.
Jordan said she received a few other texts from Young about the parties he mentioned, but she never responded and the two never met or talked again.
To Jordan, this was the last of their brief encounter.
Narrator: It was not. Last Thursday, a tweet with the photo of Jordan, along with other selfies the man took with other women, cropped up online and started going viral. Young bragged about getting these women's numbers, but claimed they all had boyfriends, so they didn't text him back. "Twitter do ya thang," he added.
Jordan said multiple friends screenshotted the tweet when they saw it online and recognized her, and then sent it to her.
"I actually did not even have the Twitter app on my phone and had not been on Twitter in months," she added.
She was so "bothered" by the random and public mischaracterization of her and their encounter, that she couldn't not log into Twitter to try to set the record straight.
Other guys jumped into his mentions to joke.
"I saw it as an attempt to 'out' me and the other girls in the photos in attempt to gain some sort of social acknowledgement for it and get retweets from it," Jordan said. She decided to respond publicly.
"lmao FIRST OF ALL, I don't have a boyfriend. I just didn't reply," she simply wrote.
"I don’t think that someone should be able to gain anything [at] the cost of someone else’s reputation," Taylor added. She confirmed that she does not have a boyfriend.
"I wasn’t looking for it to blow up the way it did — it just happened that way." Taylor's response has been retweeted over 83,000 times.
It also raised a lot of questions from people asking why she'd given him her number in the first place.
Or, why she "couldn't tell him that privately." (To which someone promptly responded with reason.)
"I stand by my decision to post my response," Jordan said. "I gave him my number because I can, and potentially wanted to know about parties later."
So you gave him your number because..? https://t.co/eN4iAirBVd
"However, in doing so, I am under no obligation to respond and if I don’t and someone’s feelings get hurt to the point where they have to do something like this, that just goes to show how entitled, yet oblivious, boys — not men — can be."
"I don’t get on Twitter much, and this whole thing was a reminder as to why I don’t and why I don’t need to," she concluded.
Damn, Twitter really did it’s thing tho. https://t.co/bNyp8aJdqu
UPDATE — The man in the photo, who identified himself as Fred Young, responded to BuzzFeed News and Jordan's comments, saying it was all "a joke."
"Long story short it was a joke," he said. "I just took a picture with the girls for contact info and used the pictures as a satire on the 'Twitter do ya thang' movement."