Bullying for Bieber

If you’re looking here for coverage about the Golden Globes, go to TMZ or some other gossip news site. The Golden Globes, as with most award ceremonies, are glorified end-of-year lists that people only care about to validate their taste in movies. They are never relevant, unless they confirm that I have impeccable taste in art.

In a much more disturbing trend, 4Chan , a hive of notorious online trolls, kicked off a horrid abuse of their internet powers a couple weeks ago. In what should really have been a non-news story, Justin Bieber was caught smoking weed for the first time. By caught, I mean he was snapped in a photograph with what looked like a “suspicious cigarette.”

Still, when a teen pop sensation smokes weed, people are bound to start a fuss over it. Unfortunately, most of Bieber’s fans are younger people who still do not understand exactly what marijuana is, and believe this to be detrimental to the pop singer they have turned into an idol.

4Chan decided to pounce on this by convincing his young fans to cut themselves to demonstrate how upset they were with Bieber for smoking weed.

If you want to take a moment to be revolted, by all means, go ahead.

The worst part of it all? Tweens and teens went through with it. Self-harm is nothing to joke about, especially trying to convince others to participate.

Other celebrities, such as Miley Cyrus, tried to speak out and stop anyone from being convinced into doing so, tweeting “#cutforbieber? Cutting is NOT something to joke about. There are people who are actually suffering from self-harm, this is so disrespectful.”

Unfortunately, Cyrus and those who shared her concern were drowned out by other social media users egging the entire situation on and laughing about it.

Most of the trolls (read: young, white men who get off on being obnoxious) don’t care for the repercussions, especially since they won’t have to think about this two weeks from now.

Those who do regrettably cut for Bieber? They will have to live with their scars for their entire life. To say that this is peer pressure doesn’t even do it justice, this is the internet using the pressure to conform to twist what could have been just a stupid photograph into a nightmare for teens and their parents.

My level of disgust associated with every aspect of this story is incredibly high, as this shouldn’t have even been a thing. Bieber smoking weed is not something we should be concerned about. Making kids believe that this is something they should self-harm over is not a laughing matter.

If we haven’t reached the point yet where we are too dependent on pop culture to set an example of how we want to behave, it seems like it is impossible to know when this is going to stop.