Justin Bieber fans urged to cut themselves to stop him from smoking weed [View all]

[UnrepentantLiberal]

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Western civilisation hit a new low yesterday when some 4chan users decided to see just how much they could mess with the minds of Justin Bieber fans. The internet trolls took inspiration from an earlier stunt whereby a wise guy tweeted that Justin had cancer and that Beliebers should cut off their hair in sympathy. Upping the ante, 4chan seized upon the story that Bieber had been caught smoking weed and suggested that teenagers take drastic action to get him to quit. To quote Gawker:

Operation Cut For Bieber launched this morning with a hashtag on Twitter that proved so successful, it was trending nationwide within hours … "You stop using drugs and we'll stop cutting. You make this world meaningless and we've lost hope," tweeted @brittanyscrapma, one of several dummy accounts … The hashtags #cutforbieber and #cuttingforbieber quickly amassed dozens of photos from teens and tweens who claim to have slashed their wrists and forearms over Bieber's drug use, but it remains unclear how many of the photos are authentic, and how many have been seeded by 4chan users. Regardless, the fact that the hashtags are trending at all is disturbing enough.

Predictably, BuzzFeed does us the courtesy of publishing some of those “disturbing photos” on the shady pretext of letting us decide for ourselves how authentic they are. Are they real, are they fake? Who cares? They’re sick and there was absolutely no journalistic value served in printing them. That’s why there’s no BuzzFeed link in my post and probably never will be again.

The story raises several questions. First, why didn’t Twitter crack down on this immediately? If it can ban neo-Nazis from tweeting, then it should be able to exercise some discretion over a user advocating self mutilation. Second, who is running these scams and what on Earth motivates them to do it? I don’t want to jump on the anti-troll bandwagon: anyone who sends me an obnoxious tweet does so to a man who either doesn’t care or who has heard it all before. But the 4chan campaign was targeted at one of the most fragile minorities on the planet – teenage girls. Encouraging hormonal teens to self-harm isn’t a prank. It’s a form of existential assault.

More: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100197042/justin-bieber-fans-urged-to-cut-themselves-to-stop-him-from-smoking-weed-this-belieber-madness-must-cease/