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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9370259" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>It’s kind of a difficult thing to source due to a lack of scholarly research on the matter, made even harder by the abysmal lack of archival on social media sites. But, some amateur internet sleuths have succeeded in tracing some of the more famous absurd Tumblr posts to deliberate “hostile astroturfing” (thanks [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER] for the term, I’m stealing it) from the chan-sphere. Sarah Z is an YouTuber with a pretty large and well-researched body of work breaking down 2010s fandom culture, though fair warning, her videos are long and if you’re disinclined to give much credence to leftist video essayists, you may not find them persuasive. Her most directly relevant videos to this question would be “Tumblr’s fakest story: the tale of Oppa Homeless Style” and “Fandom Wars: the story of proshippers vs antis.” Her videos about Homestuck and My Immortal are also relevant, though less directly so. There was also a semi-recent article about the phenomenon on Vox, titled “Puritanism took over online fandom, and then came for the rest of the internet” that gives a brief overview - again, far from a scholarly source, but a place to get started if you want to do more independent research on the matter.</p></blockquote><p></p>