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.
None of this would be going on without the weird cult of Bieber to fuel it. Justin’s obviously a talented boy – ambitious, clean, Christian and deeply upset about any offence that his smoking a joint might have caused. Yes, I guess I would be happy to take him home to meet my parents.
But he’s not Jesus Christ – no matter how hard our culture promotes him as such. It seems that the star-making potential of the entertainment industry hasn't been undone by the intrusive, democratic internet. On the contrary, it has augmented the appeal of individuals who are worshipped from afar, in chatrooms which have become temples of self-affirming adoration for the latest deity. Whereas in the past a crush on a pop star would be mediated through a teenage magazine run by adults (with an ancient agony aunt on the back page to remind you to keep your fantasies in check), now the hysteria is unmanaged and echoed through a thousand discussion boards dominated by naive kids. Twitter is the worst of the lot. As the 4chan trolls showed – you can start an idea rolling, give it a dash of authenticity with photos, let people read what they want in to it and, potentially, spark a revolution in the locked bedrooms of the under-18s. This is what happens when the internet undermines parental and editorial control.
Perhaps the damage would be mitigated if the hysteria could be directed at someone older than Justin Bieber. Gone are the times when popular culture encouraged children to aspire to be adults – either to imitate or love mature people with something to say for themselves beyond (to quote Mr Bieber) “Baby, baby, baby, baby, ooooh, baby.” I’ll concede that the singers of the 1950s weren’t always much more eloquent, but with the maturity of the old stars did come maturity of feeling in the fans. Nobody was ever going to cut themselves over Andy Williams.
By contrast, Justin-worship is part of the latter-day cult of youth. Sexless, vague, pouting, emotional, wracked with some metaphysical crisis that is beyond words – these teenage saints inspire so much emotion precisely because they are so lacking in obvious emotional history themselves. They are whatever the devotee wants them to be, and their lack of personality means that they never disappoint. The fans project all sorts of confused desires on to those blank canvasses. And so we end up with the twisted thought process whereby a Belieber believes she might win Justin’s heart by cutting herself: "It's what he'd want me to do because, well, Twitter says so…"
The perverse antics of 4chan highlight a contemporary cultural problem: we allow immature emotions to be directed at immature people. Justin’s a nice boy, but someone needs to sit the Beliebers down and tell them that he’s just not worth all this nonsense. It's getting out of hand.
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