Zamii070 Controversy
In 2015, fan artist Zamii070 was posting art on Tumblr for fandoms like My Little Pony and Steven Universe. They posted some art that made the plus-size character Rose Quartz skinny and art that portrayed Fluttershy as a Native American, among other things. What followed was months of intense and persistent harassment across Tumblr from fans attacking them for their artistic interpretations, escalating into a total character assassination until the artist attempted suicide.
This situation's stakeholders included the artist, Zamii070, the fans harassing them, and the show's creators such as Rebecca Sugar, who got involved at one point to denounce the harassers. This controversy also involved many ethical concerns, including policing art, harassing individuals, organized and relentless social media threats and mockery, character assassination to the point of attempted suicide, and the misuse of labels like racist, ableist, pedophile, etc.
Reading this situation through a Rights Lens, the harassing fans infringed on an individual's right to make art and interpret a show's art style to their personal art style. The harassing fans claimed the artist didn't have the right to use their art as personal expression rather than exact duplication of the show's art style.
Reading through a Justice Lens, this whole situation was a gross miscarriage of justice. The fans believed they were carrying out their own justice online by calling the artist out for their problematic portrayals and giving Zamii070 fair treatment by forcing them to face the consequences of their actions. However, these fans took their so-called justice much too far, and instead completely destroyed the individual.
Read through a Utilitarian Lens, the fans were not thinking about the risk to the individual's mental health or physical safety by threatening them so much. They did not think about the consequences of their own actions in their attempt to prove they had the moral high ground—instead, they just dogpiled on this artist, joining in a mob mentality to hurt them.
The platform used in this situation was Tumblr. Its affordances that were taken advantage of were tagging, creation, and shareability, and lack of moderation. Because there were no moderators to stop the harassment, it kept going. The fans did not do much to moderate their own behavior. The fans relentlessly tagged the artist in harassment posts and threads. When it comes to the affordance of creation, the creator was able to put art out in the first place, but then harassers also had the ability to create memes, posts, and blogs degrading the artist. Shareability was also taken advantage of: fans could reblog, tag, and create blogs with the sole purpose of targeting the artist.
















