The world was saddened yesterday by the news of pop legend Michael Jackson passing away. The internet went into meltdown with the LA Times, one of the first sites to report the death, shutting down because of the volume of traffic.
Just like many other people, I was a big fan of Michael Jacksons music. Thriller was the first album I bought as a child and I recall my mum even taking me to his awful film Moonwalker! And just like most other people, my opinion of him as a human opinion dropped considerably over the last 10 years due to all the allegations from minors etc, something which I don’t think I need to go into in this post.
Nevertheless, the response from the world about his passing has rightfully been positive. One person who wasn’t respectful was self professed internet celebrity Perez Hilton. When the news first came out Perez wrote a post suggesting that his reported death was just a stunt to generate interest in his upcoming tour.
The backlash he received was huge and he duly took the post down, but not before many people screenprinted the post.
The above post was quickly replaced with a few respectful posts including a rememberence post, however the damage was done. You only have to read some of the replies to see how angry people are about Perezs actions.
At the moment there is a huge campaign on Twitter to unfollow Perez (see #unfollowperez). Twitter themselves appear to be editing the Twitter Trends area so that this campaign doesn’t show however it doesn’t seem to be slowing it down.
I have to agree with Pete Cashmore that this kind of thing (speculatative posts) undermines the crediblity of all bloggers. Fake death reports on the internet are common but I think those with a large readership need to do a little more research before posting pure speculation.
I already do not follow Perez Hilton–therefore, I would recommend everyone do the same.
I am not sure how anyone could read his arrogant trash and his audacity to portray himself better than anyone else.
More power to those that will boycott such trash journalism as Perez Hilton produces.
The #unfollowperez campaign may be alive and well on twitter, but it certainly appears, at least in the last few days, Perez Hilton’s # of followers has gone UP, not down. It appears more likely that the hatred being spread is in fact helping to further his celebrity status rather than diminish it.
IMHO, this is not a sign of a campaign that is alive and well, but rather a campaign that waning and dying.
[...] and #moonfruit) because of the promise of a free iPod. More notable memes were #unfollowdiddy and #unfollowperez. On any day these memes occupied all the spots on the trending topics list. I remember several [...]
He needs to interview me about my new reality show