Up until last week, "One Direction Infection," a Tumblr blog created and maintained by an eighth grader we'll call Claire, looked like any other 14-year-old's Tumblr: a bright pink background, a default font that resembles cute handwriting, an embedded MP3 player playing Daddy Yankee and Jesse McCartney, and scores of photographs and animated GIFs of the members of One Direction, Britain's biggest boy band.
It still looks like that, mostly—same background, same font, same Justin Timberlake song on the music player—but over the weekend Claire's subject matter took a sharp turn. In place of candid shots of Harry Styles and Zayn Malik, there are now photos of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; instead of inspirational image macros, there are annotated crime scene photos. The precocious, self-concious tone remains, and when you visit your browser still reads "One Direction Infection," but the blog has a new URL:
http://free-jahar.tumblr.com.
"Jahar" is what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends and Twitter followers call him, and #FreeJahar is the hashtag banner around which thousands of people have rallied on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook to closely follow Tsarnaev's case and share what they believe to be evidence of his innocence. I tracked Claire down (through her One Direction fan fiction page) and, over Twitter direct messages, asked her about her Tumblr.
"I do believe he is very cute, but that’s not the reason I am personally involved in this movement," she emailed me back. "I am in this because I don’t believe its right to put a totally innocent person in jail for the rest of his/her life or even death penalty. I don’t care who it is, it just isn’t fair."
Like the "Holmies" and "Columbiners" devoted to the Aurora, Colo. and Columbine High School shoters, respectively, #FreeJahar has its roots in "fandom" culture—
those devoted communities of admirers, usually young women, that organize themselves on sites like Tumblr, exchanging photographs, fan art and writing, and expressions of "the feels," a near-undefinable flood of emotion and desire. (Rachel Monroe wrote a fantastic essay on the topic last year.) But it's been combined with the conspiratorial rhetoric of sites like Infowars or Natural News, and informed by viral "issue" campaigns like Kony 2012. The result is a strange hybrid phenomenon—part conspiracy-mongering, part gushing fandom, part political movement, part self-promotional tool, structured by social media, populated almost entirely by teenagers and stubbornly resistant to argument.
~snip~
But #FreeJahar resists describing itself as a "fandom." Because #FreeJahar is mostly young and largely female, its habitués struggle with the perception that their interest in the Tsarnaev's case is mostly about Tsarnaev himself.
"i’ve noticed the only thing the haters can say is: all the people on this tag are young horny girls [and] we are only defending Jahar because he’s good looking," one blogger wrote. (The fact that dedicated #FreeJahar blogs routinely reblog posts calling
Tsarnaev "the world[']s hottest terrorist" or collecting tweets about Tsarnaev's good looks doesn't help.) Claire isn't the only one who thinks Tsarnaev is cute, but says she would support him in any case:
Aware of the mocking (and sometimes shocked) coverage of "Holmies," the James Holmes fandom that emerged in the wake of the shooting last year, #FreeJahar regulars are self-conscious about the fangirl label. (With the exception of Claire, every blogger I contacted refused to answer questions, or didn't respond to requests for comment.) Claire doesn't even think #FreeJahar is a fandom. "TV/Music fandoms are more into how a person looks or how well they sing/act," she explains, while #FreeJahar "is something more serious and more in-depth than that. It also helps solves 'political' acts where as a fandom does nothing like that." Rather than structure themselves around a communal identity, like "Holmies" or "Columbiners," #FreeJahar adherents convoke around a hashtag—like #Kony2012. In other words: it's not a fandom, it's a movement.
And as a movement, it needs convictions. Where in the case of the shooting in Aurora, the conspiracy theorists (and there were many) and the Holmies largely kept to their own corners of the web, #FreeJahar is a marriage of the two. It may draw heavily on fandom culture, but it relies just as much on the skepticism and paranoia of sites like Prison Planet and Godlike Productions, not to mention their rhetorical techniques—the annotated images, the dramatically narrated YouTube videos, the willingness to embrace even mutually contradictory pieces of evidence.
The only thing surprising about the collision of the worlds of conspiracy and fandom is that it's taken this long to happen.
They're both mostly populated with teenagers and 20somethings. Young people like Claire (and like Tamerlan Tsarnaev) drive an enormous online conspiracy economy; they're the ones speculating about which rap stars are Illuminati members on message boards and creating and sharing dramatic YouTube videos that end up with 13 million views. Claire told me the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings were her entry into the world of conspiracies:
"I thought it was a big tragedy until I watched a video of the conspiracy being explained and ever since I have strong feelings about it being staged."
http://gawker.com/freejahar-when-conspiracy-theorists-and-one-direction-478152664