Popular TikTok couple Matt and Abby may be the subject of a lot of the videos on your For You page right now -- but the reason seemed at first not to be a good one.
The parents have found themselves in the middle of a major online controversy due to a recent post, and nothing they revealed about the situation since seemed to made it better. In fact, things seemed to only get worse since all this began. Until they took to Instagram to clear things up.
Influencers Matt and Abby Howard were on a cruise with their two young children (ages 2 and 1) when they posted about going to dinner at one of the ship's restaurants. What started the controversy involved the fact that it turned out they had seemingly left the kids unattended in their rooms.
The couple ended up using FaceTime to view the kids' baby monitors, which is what the original photo depicted. Only after extreme backlash did they have to explain what really happened.
At first, many of their fans pointed to Madeleine McCann as the reason what Matt and Abby allegedly did was wrong. The young girl went missing and was never found after she was left unattended by her parents in a similar fashion to Matt and Abby leaving their kids alone.
But the influencers have now claimed that their audience jumped to conclusions in response to Abby's initial post.
Matt explained that, “People started to speculate and believe that we had left our children alone in their staterooms — and that is just completely untrue.” Apparently there was someone watching the kids while Matt and Abby went to dinner; the kids were never left unattended.
Abby also explained why she deleted the original post, clarifying: “I can see where my story did lead to misunderstanding, which is why I ended up deleting it several hours after posting it."
It's not uncommon for the internet to immediately run with assumptions, but this is one of those cases where it does seem a genuine mistake was made and corrected as soon as possible.