Apparently no teen is immune from the problems of cyber bullying, including pop phenomenon, Justin Bieber. Thankfully, most of our kids don’t have to worry about being bullied by bloggers from “The Wrap” to “The Huffington Post.” Bieber, however, is living out his high school years in the eye of the internet storm, so when he has an embarrassing moment it turns into viral internet news.
So what did Beiber do that was so embarrassing? If you’re not a 12 year old girl or an internet junkie, you might have missed the story. Beiber was interviewed by a talk show host from New Zealand, earlier this week. The host asked Bieber a series of “true or false” questions, including the question “True or False: ‘Beiber is German for basketball.” Beiber got confused over the word “German” and though the interviewer repeated it several times, Beiber finally just gave up on the question by saying: “We don’t say that in America.”
Watch the video and see if you agree, but it seems pretty obvious that Bieber just couldn’t understand the host’s accent, which is pretty thick. And by the time he looks at the interviewer’s cue card, he’s clearly very flustered. But that’s not what the internet has been mocking him for – instead bloggers across the web have been cackling over the assumption that Justin Bieber doesn’t know what German is.
The Huffington Post has amended it’s original post, since they found an interview the singer did in Germany back in August in which he talks extensively about his German relatives and even counts to ten in the language. Bieber mentions that interview too in his Twitter defense against the online teasing:
“I count in GERMAN and translate my own name. Guess I know what German is. Guess home schooling is working out. Do your research next time b4 making a lame attempt at hating on a 16 year old.”
Even if the kid should have been able to put two and two together and get “German” from the “Jewman” he claims to have thought the host was saying, lets cut him a break. If we, the mostly adult denizens of the blogosphere, can’t resist tormenting a teenager who had a bad afternoon in cyberspace, how do we expect to tell teens to stop cyber bullying each other?
