This viral tweet complaining about the Little Mermaid casting being racist has a profile pic stolen from an Instagram model. The “half black best friend” pic is taken from god knows where, but shows up in a bunch of Pinterest BFF roundups pic.twitter.com/aYMwKf1XNl— Brandon Wall (@Walldo) July 4, 2019
The tweeter, a girl named Rebeccs, was threatening to throw her DVD copy of The Little Mermaid into the trash. But eagle-eyed Brandon Wall noticed that the girl's profile picture was taken from elsewhere on the internet. In other words: The girl was using a FAKE picture of herself.
My theory is that this was parody outrage. The girl was just trolling, and she didn't seriously hate the casting decision. But she knew the lemmings on Twitter would go CRAZY the moment they noticed someone dissing the choice of Halle Bailey for Ariel--especially if the person doing the dissing gave off a racist vibe.
Brandon Wall, however, zeroed in on the fact that the girl was using a fake profile photo. And so, of course, you have a lot of people talking about how "Rebeccs" was a front.
Here's the thing, though: I don't think people understood the nature of her deception. Rebeccs was playing into the stereotype of a racist white girl, and she was doing it for laughs. She wasn't, like, a Russian troll or anything. (At least, I don't think so.)
The problem is that Twitter suspended Rebecc's account, so now there's no way to review her tweet history. I did glance through her history briefly, and my impression was that she was American AF. That was just my impression, though. I wish I knew WHY Twitter suspended the account--that would be enlightening.
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