PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — Free diver, Tiffany Marie Owen's videos evoke fear and wonder in the hundreds of thousands who follow her underwater adventures on social media.
Free divers aim for depth or navigate underwater tunnels without using breathing equipment. Owen says she hit a personal best this year, holding her breath while diving down shy of 100 feet.
“I think I find most of my joy when I am able to hit depth,” she said.
She may love the deep dives, but Owen’s cave adventures tend to go viral on social media. Over 211 million people viewed one of her tunnel swims on TikTok shortly after she posted it in March.
She told ABC Action News. “And everything I posted after that was doing very well.”
Owen says she unexpectedly made a couple of thousand dollars from her content. Still, after her posts turned profitable, an imposter created a fake Facebook account in her name, copying and sharing her page’s content. “I just felt like I was stolen from. I feel like I was cheated," she said. "I feel like I had put so much work into these videos.”
She fears the person behind the copycat page might make money off unsuspecting followers. “One of my videos had a couple million views on this fake page," she said.
Owen’s biggest concern is the fake page may not be sharing all of the warnings she posts about the dangers of free driving and the precautions she takes every time she goes under. Or that she dives with two safety guides in case anything goes wrong.
Owen has reported the imposter to Facebook and its parent company, Meta, but the fake page hasn't been taken down.
Cyber security expert Keyaan Williams says celebrities and politicians have advantages regarding take-down requests. “Meta is going to prioritize well-known people who can make problems for them or just be the squeaky wheel that ends up getting the oil," he said.
Williams advises smaller social media influencers like Owen to share their story and urge all of their followers to petition the social media company on their behalf. “An influencer of any size has the ability to exercise their influence to try to get the owner of social media or to get the marketplace to take action,” he said.
Owen has launched a public campaign on her social media channels.
On its website, Facebook says its goal is to remove as many fake accounts as possible, but they prioritize enforcement against the accounts that seek to cause harm.
