Local Woman Speaks Out Against Cyberbullies After Post Shaming Her For Her Weight

(CBS) -- When one local woman found out she'd been shamed for months online about her weight without her knowledge, she fought back.

In this Original Report, she spoke with CBS 2's Brad Edwards.

After a friend called her, 24-year-old Hale Goetz saw an old high school yearbook picture next to a more recent picture that was posted to the Reddit subreddit r/funny 10 months ago. It has been seen more than 750,000 times.

"At first I was a little bit angry, but I felt really embarrassed because the things that they were saying were definitely things that I had thought before about myself too," Goetz said.

So she wrote about it on the website Jezebel in a post entitled: "When Your Fat Pic Goes Viral as a Feminist Cautionary Tale."

In the first 24 hours, it received 1,000 comments and a lotta love.

"The article's not for all the people who made fun of me, it's for all the people who are being made fun of," she said.

A key take-away: "When you show people how to learn something through empathy instead of scorn you reach a lot more people," Goetz said.

In less than a day, her editorial was clicked on 300,000 times.

Goetz tells Brad that she doesn't have a clue who posted that original side-by-side picture of her.