4chan, the website that is infamous for Internet trolls, is at it again. This time, the “joke” is an attempt to get underage girls to bare their breasts on Twitter.
First, it was #BaldForBieber, a somewhat less harmful prank that encouraged teens to shave their heads over a false rumor that Justin Bieber had cancer. Then, it was #CutForBieber, an even more harmful prank, not only trying to encourage teens to self-harm, but also making fun of a very serious problem. This time it is #Boobs4Bieber, which amounts to child porn if any underage fans think it is real, and decide to participate.
I’m not sure what I can say about this latest attempt from 4chan. I am repulsed, to put it mildly.
The current upside to this latest prank is that, so far, it is failing to trend.
We live in a day and age where it appears that our children are constantly bombarded with new and unimaginably horrific situations in which they may feel forced to participate in order to gain acceptance. At times, social media is a double-edged sword. On one side, it allows people of all ages to come together and find a community they may not be able to access in “the real world.” On the other side, we have supposed adults attempting to trick underage boys and girls — though the focus in this prank are the girls — into performing acts that are undeniably illegal.
The only thing I can stress at this moment is to please talk to your teens and tweens about this. While it is important to allow your children a certain amount of freedom to grow and figure out the world on their own, it is also important to balance this with informing them that there are people on the Internet whose only goal appears to be to cause harm.
You can read more about this story on the Daily Dot, complete with screenshots of the 4chan discussion about this latest prank. Warning: It contains NSFW language and images. Also, I suggest that you do not read the hashtag. I have purposely not linked to it because it does contain images of breasts, and there is no immediate way of knowing if they are images of adults who are trying to enable this prank, or of underage children.
