4chan's Operation GemPolish - How Tumblr Took Another Troll Hook, Line, and Sinker

Yes we're aware this isn't pony. But it IS cartoon, 4chan, and tumblr, so fuck it.

At the dawn of Tumblr in 2007, there was peace.  Peace, achieved through overwhelming obscurity.
That peace lasted until 2010, when the users, drunk on their 3 years of hugbox wine, got too big for their britches and decided to kick the hornets nest that was 4chan (4chan at this time was in the midst of some of their most notorious raids).

4chan awoke from their slumber and punished tumblr so severely (rendering it briefly inoperable, and flooding every feed with violent pornography). They left them for dead and carried on. It was thought they would never make the same mistake again.

Then, in July of 2014, they made the same mistake again, reheating a long dormant conflict between the social justice fanatics, and the free-speech free-for-all that is 4chan once again, resulting in major tears from the tumblrs.

Well here we are in Summer 2015 and /b/ has decided to go on a fishing trip, using their new favorite bait: Steven Universe.

They started to run out of hooks.
The plan was simple: prove once again (but never for-all, where's the fun in that?) the hypocrisy that plagues the microblogging site's userbase. Accomplish this, by doing something that the site has always done, and wait for the rage to get so bad that the administrators outright delete the account without it actually breaking any laws.

And they succeeded.

How? They made an account dedicated to doing only one thing: changing the races of Steven Universe characters from artwork, and posting them on an account, complete with attribution of the source materials. They claimed to be a transgender individual who liked Steven Universe who liked to make fanart.

Then they waited.

In mere days, every "Steven Universe" tag on Tumblr was flooded with images of characters that have had their colors changed, and tens of thousands of angry posts decrying "racism" "bigotry" "whitewashing" and every other buzzword imaginable.

What's more, is that the users were almost completely unaware that the "offending" account was just bait, that they swallowed: hook, line, sinker, reel, pole, and boat. In droves, hundreds and thousands of requests to delete and block the account came, despite there being little to no commentary about the artwork itself.

Given that many of the characters of the show are a different species, from a different planet, who have no discernible race or gender as they would apply to humans, it is common practice to assign characters races arbitrarily when creating alternative artwork of them - a practice that tumblr
embraces.

Or, it does until YOU color them differently.

4chan, however, didn't really care for any of the political motivations behind the art, or any of the socioeconomic connotations of character races, they were just "in it for the lulz". They expected Tumblr to apply their own biases and flip their collective shits at whatever they threw at them - and they did not disappoint. 

So, the Steven Universe fans began to endlessly re-blog the bait with all of their outrage, until they themselves were responsible for flooding every major relevant tag and feed with the racially altered images.

Ultimately, the "raiders" achieved their ultimate goal; which was to offend so many people by doing nothing but changing color on cartoon characters, that they were put out of commission by Tumblr itself, which outright deleted the http://steven-universe-edits.tumblr.com/ account.  

Operation Gem Polish was a complete success for the trolls. They have since moved on to lulzier pastures. Tumblr, however continues to smolder, largely unaware of the lengths to which they were just taken for a ride.

And that kids is the story of another battle in the ongoing Internet pissing match that is 4chumblr.

Think they'll ever understand the concepts of irony or hypocrisy?