The internet, impressionable teenagers and malicious online ne'er-do-wells combined for a potentially tragic hoax on Friday, in which Justin Bieber's loyal fans were supposedly duped into shaving their head in support of Bieber having cancer.
Of course, it's not true. At first glance, the image that circulated around social networking sites looks convincing.
Members of the infamous imageboard site 4chan had edited the picture together, fabricating what looked like a breaking news announcement from Entertainment Weekly, and an admission from Bieber himself.
This picture was making the rounds on sites such as Twitter
And so, the hashtag #baldforbieber was born. However, according to Mashable and one Reddit user who claims to have been in on the project, no one seems to have fallen for it, fortunately.
Reddit user ErroneousDylan wrote:
This is actually not true at all. I was there when we started this s**t. Somebody made a few twitter accounts, we edited Wikipedia, we spammed chat rooms, and we even posted here on Reddit (but it was deleted for lack of evidence). Somebody made a few fake news posts too which were convincing but without a link it wasn't enough.
The girls you are seeing are actually sisters/girlfriends of a few /b/tards that did this to try and convince other girls to do it. I'm trying to find one of the YouTube videos of some dude's sister fake crying but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence that anyone fell for the prank, despite Twitter pages, Facebook pages and even a website, BaldForBieber.com.