If I did, however, “pull off a large scale prank” would definitely be on it.

And trust me, I’m no Jose Medina.

But tonight, if the aforementioned list existed, I would be able to cross that one off of it.

To be specific, it would actually read:

  • Convince over 2000 hipsters that their online sanctuary was about to be infiltrated by prepubescent pop sensation Justin Bieber


See, the one thing that the vast majority of the tumblr community is extremely good at being is indignant. I was going through my dashboard when I noticed a lot of posts were angry rants about how the reviled crunkcore trio Millionaires had recently joined tumblr. I was a little confused about why people were so upset.

I mean, you don’t have to follow them if you don’t want to.

After the confusion faded, my mind transitioned into the most sensible mode I know: evil genius.

It would take some planning (two minutes, specifically), but with a little bit of luck and photo manipulation, I could pull off something delicious.

I could convince tumblr that someone they despised was moving to the neighborhood and bringing their mass pool of disciples with them. I was shaking with excitement. Who could I use? Nickelback? Too transparent. Ke$ha isn’t despised enough. Then it hit me.

So I posted this:

The reaction was minuscule, but what reaction I did get was deeply concerned.

I decided to one-up myself and cause a small internet heart attack with my very limited photoshop skills.

I took this screencap off of Bieber’s twitter:

…And changed it to this:

I get email notifications on my blackberry every time someone reblogs me. I had to shut that off tonight.

I followed up this monstrosity with what would be a shining testament to how little attention people pay to the original poster on here, and how many people remove credit from original content (term used very loosely).

See, if more than 11 people saw this one and followed the address, they would have been spared their mass pants-shitting and seen this webpage:

I’m not complaining about the lack of attention or credit. It was awesome. It actually made all of this easier.

By the time I got home from my grocery run, the number of reposts of the first photoshop had skyrocketed. At the time of this entry’s initial creation, the number of people who had liked or reblogged that post rested at this handsome number:

It’s now over 2000.

UPDATE (12/07/10): Thanks to several “humour” blogs posting the same Rage meme featuring the tweet, over 20,000 people have fallen for this.

Some of my favourite thoughts:

  • “I SWEAR , IF HE GETS A TUMBLR , ANYONE THAT REPOST’S HIS SHIT WILL GET AN UNFOLLOW !”
  • “NO. Seriously?! Wtf. Stay on twitter.”
  • “I WILL FUCKING RIP HIM APART.”
  • “… Someone, slap this boy.”
  • “Im not a HUUUUUGE tumblr person but this made me want to cry for tumblr.”
  • “Hey guys leave her alone. She’s just a little kid.”
  • “HE DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE!”
  • “fuuuuh. now all the celebrities and all justins fans are gonna make a tumblr. =/ well gotta find something new now.”
  • “NO OMFG. PLEASE ANYTHING BUT THAT! D’: NONONO. bitch is going to bring unwanted overpopulation. the very coolness factor of tumblr society will go downhill!”
  • “NO NO NO NO NO OUR LITTLE PRIVACY HOLE WHERE WE COULD EXPRESS OUR FEELINGS IN WHATEVER WAY WE WISH IS NOW GOING TO BE THE NEW OVERPOPULATED SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORM”
  • “His use of a capital ‘LOL’ annoys me to no end. Just no.”


A very small minority of the people who saw this did their fact checking and discovered that none of the tweets existed, and that the URL directed to a picture of some ugly brown guy with crooked teeth.

Their rationality was of course, lost in the sound and fury of snap-judgements of the collective panty-bunched.

I mean, take a look at this string of reblogs:

Look at that. Two people called bullshit in the same thread, one of them with an actual argument. Nobody noticed.

The legacy now lives on, and, to my great pleasure, it has inspired some great followups from people who figured the deception out, like this one from fartwithheadphoneson:

And this deliciously sarcastic one from sexualchocolate:

Hell, dsfincannon upped the ante and created a fake tumblr with a bunch of absolutely hysterical posts as Justin just to fuck with people even more, which made ontd and The Daily What.

Beautiful. This was the greatest deception I have ever perpetrated.

You could accuse me of having way too much time on my hands, but the truth is, this took all of 10 minutes.

So, yeah. It was a good night. I love everything.