Recently, a photo emerged of teen idol Justin Bieber smoking a joint. On the “/b” subforum of Internet message board 4Chan, a breeding ground for memes , one of the channers posted the following in a thread about Bieber: “Lets start a cut yourself for Bieber campaign. 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.”
Immediately after this message, several fake Twitter accounts were created, posting pictures of list to data girls cutting themselves. All of these messages were accompanied by the hashtag #CuttingForBieber, #CutForBieber and #Cut4Bieber. Unfortunately, the “joke” caught on. Soon, real pictures of real girls who mutilated themselves by sticking a knife in their arm started to appear. One of the girls even added the following message: “It hurts, but I do it for my Justin” .
The person who posted the idea has since been traced . The original 4Chan thread where the self-harm photos of the victims were posted has since been deleted. Parts of the conversation that took place on 4Chan can be found on the site Cut4Bieber.com . Some of the gruesome photos can be found on the site HipHopWired.com .