Edudemic

Topics: cartoon, cartoon characters, facebook, featured, gossip

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You’ve likely seen the cartoon characters cropping up on Facebook–Reptars and Jetsons and Smurfs replacing your friends’ profile pictures. But did you know the reason behind this short-lived trend? Turns out there are several possible answers. Ostensibly, the silly campaign began by imploring users to upload a cartoon character to speak out against child abuse. Of course, the logic as to how conjuring up fond childhood memories would actually stop physical and sexual abuse is confounding. A variation instructed only those who had been abused to step forward, allowing them to reclaim their childhoods.

Rumors

Then a new rumor began to circulate–a story in the Daily Mail suggested that the Facebook carton profile pics campaign was a trap devised by pedophiles, to more easily pick out the children from Facebook’s population. And while you could argue that yes, the younger Facebook users are more likely to choose Phineas and Ferb over Garfield, it’s still a largely inconclusive way to search for a specific age group.

Good thing that Facebook agrees. Spokesman Simon Axten firmly debunked the rumor, adding, “Thousands of people have taken up the campaign, none of whom can be identified as either young or old based on the profile picture chosen.”

Where It Actually Started

According to Know Your Meme, the campaign’s true impetus was from a couple of Greek users who wanted to see if they could remove all human faces from the site for a few days.

Facebook’s Official Message

Social network giant, Facebook denies any link between their recent cartoon profile picture campaign and pedophiles.

This statement came in response to a flurry of rumors and reports that the campaign aimed at supporting the fight against child support was really a disguise by child molesters to find out of if any of the users involved in posting the cartoon pictures were children themselves. The speculation intensified after a claim came out of reports that the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children denied any connection to the campaign.

Axten told Fox News, “This rumor is false.” Additionally he insisted that “Thousands of people have taken up the campaign, none of whom can be identified as either young or old based on the profile picture chosen.”

It’s a rather disheartening end to what was a very successful movement by the social media giant, allowing users to take a trip down memory lane. The campaign fan page titled “Change your profile picture to a cartoon character campaign” got 90,000 “Likes” from Facebook users, urging them to post pictures of Scooby Doo and Tom & Jerry for e.g. in place of their faces in order to curb child abuse by triggering fond childhood memories from Facebook members.

Surely a fun measure of promoting interaction and conjuring up comments about their favorite moments from their childhood shows. It’s another seemingly mindless Facebook fad which gained lots of fanfare, all be it under the shadow of a false controversy.