Two months ago, teenager Sydney Dalton and her friends made a YouTube video saying they were over Justin Bieber and ripping his posters off her wall. The recent result: Her name trending on Twitter, the hashtag #SlutneyDalton, and violent threats.
Dalton apparently deleted the video not long after uploading it — she says she was only temporarily over Bieber — and it’s not clear why it saw a resurgence yesterday. Rumors spread on Twitter that she and Bieber were dating, that she was asked to be in his 3D movie, that he sang “One Less Lonely Girl” to her at a recent Madison Square Garden concert, that she got free tickets to his concerts, that she called Justin a fag and told him it was his fault his parents had split.
Dalton denies all of it, but that didn’t stop the virulent anger against her, with fans proclaiming that it wasn’t fair propelling her name into a trending topic, or most-tweeted-about phrases of the day.
A fan named @godsgirl8464 showed her piety by creating a list of Sydney Dalton haters. Dalton was called a slut, a bitch, and a whore, among others. A representative sample, much of it retweeted over 100 times:
Perhaps most terrifying were the response videos created. This one is particularly chilling — a baby-faced girl promises to hit Sydney “in the fucking face with a full wine bottle” — and it has over 5,000 views.
Here’s one of several videos in which Bieber fans rip up photos of Dalton herself.
Dalton already had around 10,000 followers on Twitter (presumably fellow Biebettes) before this melee, which has earned her about seven thousand more. For a teenage girl (she lists her age on YouTube as 20 but is clearly much younger) being bombarded by literally thousands of haters, she is remarkably self-possessed. From her response early this morning:
i am not a whore nor an attention whore. i didn’t ask for you to make me a tt [trending topic] nor did i ask you to gain me 7,000 followers. you all blew it our of proportion…
you don’t have to like me. you can hate me (idk why you would, since justin doesn’t) but there is no need to send me death threats. my friends and i screen capped some of the bad ones and i am still debating if i should bring it to the police. i don’t care if that’s immature, i want you guys to learn a lesson. you can’t cyber bully people. honestly it’s not right.
On Twitter, she added, “Can you all focus more attention on a hurricane that can kill people rather then talking about wanting to kill me? Thanks,” and “Thanks to everyone defending me 🙂 I really do appreciate it. I’m just not gonna let these HATERS ruin my day. Love you all :)”
Maybe this habitual and popular user of YouTube, Tumblr, and Twitter sees a separation between Internet fury and actual risk, or maybe she’s more alarmed than she’s letting on. In any case, last year, Dalton and a friend made this video acting out Regina George’s meanest parts from Mean Girls. Perhaps Dalton drew the right messages from the movie — you know, the part about “Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”
