Full disclosure: I do pay to watch every movie that Channing Tatum is in (especially if he is shirtless in them).
I do consider myself a very devoted constituent and “Crazy In Love” with Queen Bey.
I do tell my mom to “Stop being such a muggle” every time she catches me watching Harry Potter marathons on TV and tells me to “Change the channel; you’ve watched it a million times.”
I have celebrity crushes, musical idols and “fandoms” that I belong to, like anybody else. I waste my time searching every crevice on the Internet about any information I can find. I spend money on movies, books and CDs to support their work. I know what it is like to be a quintessential fan of somebody. I will not, however, resort to self-harm to show my devotion or love for them.
On Jan. 8, the hashtag #cutforbieber or #cut4bieber was trending globally on Twitter. The hashtag was a protest against a photograph of Justin Bieber allegedly smoking marijuana that went viral the weekend before. Supposedly, fans of the 18-year-old Canadian crooner were cutting themselves–that is, self mutilation by slitting their wrists–and then posting pictures of it on Twitter in order to get him to stop smoking marijuana.
Disturbingly enough, the #cutforbieber hashtag initially started as a joke by the prankster website 4chan.
“Let’s start a cut yourself for Bieber campaign,” an anonymous user wrote on a 4chan message board, according to Billboard. “Tweet a bunch of pics of people cutting themselves and claim we did it because Bieber was smoking weed. See if we can get some little girls to cut themselves.”
The result was an influx of parody accounts of people posing as teenagers and posting gruesome pictures of their cut wrists and arms. Many mocked the trend with posting pictures of them threatening to cut their hair, pets or themselves by smearing ketchup on their arms.
Regardless of the fact that the hashtag ended up being a hoax, self-harm is not a laughing matter. According to the World Health Organization, experts estimate that 4 percent of the population struggles with self-injury, especially teenage girls.
This also was not the first time the 4chan group tried to bait “Beliebers.” Last year, the Internet trollers started a rumor that Bieber was diagnosed with cancer and encouraged his hard core fans to #shave4bieber and shave their head bald to support the singer.
However, maybe the real message here (aside from the fact that the people on 4chan need to get a life) is that people need to reexamine the line between fans, fanaticism and obsession.
While it’s easy to point the blame on the group of Internet pranksters and maybe even Bieber himself, I think the blame should be placed on the corporate fat cats whose sole mission is to turn vulnerable consumers into zealous fanatics.
Pop idols like Bieber or British group One Direction were made to steal the love and devotion of young, naïve girls for profit. These corporate bigwigs will sell anything they can stick their talent on, and fans will continue to buy and pay ridiculous amounts of money just to prove their fanatic ways. Companies are breeding this type of devotion and encouraging behaviors like the ones that the group of people on 4chan mock.
However, it’s not to say that teenage girls are the only ones guilty of this. As consumers, we are constantly led to believe that if we do not get a certain product, our lives will end and we will cease to exist. We see this with the Apple craze that’s sweeping the globe. First, we all needed iPods, and then the iPod nanos, the iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone with Siri, iPad and if that wasn’t enough we needed a hybrid between an iPod touch and iPad and needed the iPad mini.
It’s an infiltrated way of thinking that we can’t live without these things. It’s just like equating Bieber or the One Direction boys to the Holy Grail.
In the end, fans just need to take a step back and reexamine their level of devotion towards the certain celebrity or group. They also need to stop believing everything they find on the Internet. In turn, Internet trollers need to fully realize the implications of some of their jokes, as it often tends to do more harm than good.
By: Julianne Micoleta