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#goBaldForBLM: Did women really fall for troll trend started by 4chan amid protests over George Floyd's death?

'Guilt them into getting rid of their straight ‘white’ hair to show ‘solidarity’ with black women'
PUBLISHED JUN 5, 2020
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, social media has turned into a kind of battleground. Cascading information from all fronts in this battle makes it difficult to process and often fully understand what’s going on, but here’s our best attempt to decode what is going on with #goBaldForBLM, a trend that seems to have been going on throughout the day on Friday, June 5.

YourAnonNews, a Twitter handle that supposedly belongs to the hacktivist group Anonymous that has 7.4 million followers (different from the Twitter handle YourAnonCentral that has 6.3 million followers and has been tweeting about the K-Pop operations to dismantle racist hashtags on social media) tweeted about the trend. The account tweeted, “While our roots came from /b/, we recognize the adolescence of far Right-wing 4chan idiots trying to push an agenda. #goBaldForBLM is bulls***. Y’all know what to do.”

Let's make this clear. /b/, also known as “random”, is a board on the website 4chan, the imageboard website that has for the last few years come to be associated with the alt-Right movement. /b/, along with other boards like /pol/ (also known as “politically incorrect”) are known to be a cesspool of internet trolls and a hotbed for racist, homophobic and misogynistic messaging.

The “y’all know what to do” was likely a call for K-Pop stans to flood the hashtag with memes, GIFs, and fancams of K-Pop artists, in order to drown out the attempt to troll. And the K-Pop stans have been doing that. At the time of writing this article, the hashtag was rapidly filling up with K-Pop fandom.

Let’s now look at the troll attack itself. British alt-Right radio host Paul Joseph Watson, who was formerly associated with Alex Jones’ InfoWars website, published on his own Right-wing news blog Summit News about the 4chan bait. He shared a screenshot supposedly taken from a 4chan board that said, “Get #goBaldForBLM trending on Twitter and Instagram. The idea is to get women, particularly white women, to shave their heads for BLM. Guilt them into getting rid of their straight ‘white’ hair to show ‘solidarity’ with black women.”

He also shared photos of women who had supposedly fallen for the bait and sheared their heads in solidarity. But his claim isn’t true. For example, a Twitter user named Elaine (@laineybot20k), who claims to be 16-year-old, shared a before-and-after photo of her sheared head. The photo was captioned, “The only thing I care about today, tomorrow and in the future is #blacklivesmatter. #goBaldforBLM #ChicagoProtests.”

But a reverse image search of the after photo revealed it belonged to Taylor Kigar, a 27-year-old writer and marketing manager from Chicago. Kigar’s photo was featured in a 2018 Glamour.com feature called, ‘9 Women on What It Felt Like to Shave Their Heads’.

Another example of this duplicity comes from the account adezero (@adezero3). The account shared a photo of a bald white woman claiming, “GUYS I DID IT! #goBaldForBLM. Thanks for all the support, my husband and boyfriend both support me too! I’m going to donate it to poc. #BLM.”

The account in further tweets claimed that they were inspired by Emma Watson who also went bald for the Black Lives Matter movement, sharing a fake screengrab of an ABC News report claiming it. Adezero’s claim was also fake. Reverse-searching the image leads one to Stephanie Madsen, a cancer survivor, who also appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’ show after submitting the same photo for the “CoverGirl contest” on the show. This was in 2014.

A look at Adezero’s Twitter bio reveals that the account belongs to the Managing Editor of TheRalphRetort.com. The Ralph Report is the website of Ethan Ralph, a Right-wing commentator and a prominent voice in the Gamergate controversy.

While it’s impossible to tell if anyone actually fell for the 4chan bait to shave one's head — people may not have posted images, or they have deleted them — it is visible that there is a lot of mischief at play, even where people have claimed to do so.

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