Who is paedo bear

A spokeswoman for Nestle Australia and New Zealand told the Sydney Morning Herald [20] that they had never heard of Pedobear and did not intend for the photo to represent him.

Search for Pedobear peaked in February , when images of the character were stenciled onto the Pope's billboards in Italy. View All Videos. View All Images. Show Comments. Bragging that Silent Hill feel, image generation tool NeuralBlender can turn words into surreal but on-point images at a press of a button. Know Your Meme is an advertising supported site and we noticed that you're using an ad-blocking solution. Read Edit History. About Pedobear is a cartoon mascot that became a well-known icon through its usage on 4chan to signal moderators and other users that illegal pornographic content had been posted.

Spread Due to 4chan's anonymous environment, people tend to act without fear of retribution. Top entries this week. Various Examples. The mascot's seemingly inevitable appearance was quickly recognized by Ben Jones, one of the Penn State students on the scene, who then tweeted a picture of Pedobear interacting with news reporters outside the courthouse: Because this is what today has amounted to. Kit Kat's Facebook Announcement On July 19th, , Nestle's chocolate candy brand Kit Kat uploaded an Instagram photo of a man in a bear suit resembling Pedobear via its Facebook page [19] to announce the launch of its official Instagram account.

Search Interest Search for Pedobear peaked in February , when images of the character were stenciled onto the Pope's billboards in Italy. External References [1] Wikipedia — Kumar [2] 2ch. Latest Editorial And News.

Related Entries 10 Person Chris Hansen. Meme Dog Poo Girl. Subculture Human Flesh Search Engine. Meme Justice Porn. Event Cecil the Lion's Death. Meme Operation Shell Shock. These examples are provided to critique the limits of this online cultural capital, where its insider currency is inherently rooted in engaging with an outside off-line world that does not share its specialist knowledge.

However, its analysis focusses specifically on narrative based media that has been created within the context of digital spaces, such as meme-making and broader online humour. The selection of this uniquely digital media, though rooted in an off-line history of humour and horror, serves as a participatory space of moveable, often self-defined CSA narration that problematises set definitions of abuser and survivor.

Here, the already complex space of CSA survivordom, is developed by considering how these characters may be occupied for cultural credibility within digital communities. This is with the aim of offering an analysis of how digital media-making is subverting the fixed borders between CS abuser and survivor in order to provoke nuanced ethical questions about audience engagement with abuse-themed media.

As a result, the analysis extends beyond the literal crime of CSA, using it as a platform from which to interrogate wider questions surrounding technophobia, generational anxieties, transgressive media and digital youth culture.

Milner , a, b. These academics and critics, who are pioneering research into digital humour, within the context of folklore, humour studies, subcultural studies and horror theory, form the contextual foundations of this paper. The approach can be attributed to the seemingly new nature of the field of digital media studies, with scholars favouring accessible introductions into this supposedly unknown world over more rigorous research.

This is a system that I seek to problematise through close analysis and clear historical context, as it has the potential to fall into ahistoricism through a guise of originality. By selecting a single under-researched theme, online humorous representations of CSA, explored through one select textual analysis, the character of Pedobear, I believe I can offer a focussed interrogation which researchers can build upon to explore further subjects related to the topic of digital media studies.

When exploring questions of comic digital representations of CSA, it is important to understand the humour that surrounds the character of the online child sex predator within Internet subcultures. In this section, Pedobear is first defined and explained, before examining how the character functioned as a tool to demonstrate subcultural capital and insider humour.

This is in order to develop an analysis of naming and identifying CS abusers, and the problems this causes when these signs are in flux. The image of Pedobear originated on the Japanese message board Futaba Channel a. Here it became what we now know as Pedobear and was originally posted as a warning that child abuse images were being, or about to be, posted, and was also used more broadly to mock the concept of paedophiles and paedophilia.

In this community, the cartoon figure developed a language, a personality and even a costume. It is not until one realizes precisely what he is chasing after that his form takes on new significance. This cultivates a playful tension between the individual anonymity of the singular 4chan user and the cultural group identity of 4chan as whole, which manifests revealing in anti-social characters such as Pedobear. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact. The fact that the Internet even has a humorously cartoonish incarnation of CSA is revealing in and of itself.

Rather in this landscape of adolescent ritual, a user may playfully adopt the face, name, and even criminal backstory, of any number of existing characters the site has to offer, in order to explore the border work of transgressive, digital humour [ 12 ].

This creates a unique model of cultural capital free from many of the traditional social signifiers of either online or off-line subcultures, as explained by digital media researchers Travis Wall and Teodor Mitew:. Anonymity operates as a flattener of the [4chan] network, with each piece of content valued as is because there is no attachment to an account with a history able to generate social capital.

The only kind of capital demonstrated is cultural capital through the use of subculture-specific communication tropes known to the community Here a user is free to make as many paedophilic jokes as they please without the potential repercussions of such bad taste rhetoric being connected to an identifying profile picture, GPS location or professional e-mail address.

This dual appeal of surface level anonymity IP addresses are recorded so 4chan cannot be described as wholly anonymous and supposed unarchivability archives can still be manually constructed via screenshots is part of what its creator Christopher Poole credits as its key appeal for meme making, and it can certainly be understood when it comes to the development of humour surrounding a subject as taboo as CSA [ 16 ].

The ethically ambiguous nature of such humour is developed further when we understand that the original Pedobear response images were in the face of real images of child abuse being posted on the site Figure 3. This is a backstory satirically retold on Encylopedia Dramatica , a provocative parodic wiki site, which documents so much of 4chan folklore, as follows:. The function of pomp and parody in lampooning the CSA-accusing subject positions him as a precursor to digital humour surrounding moralistic Internet vigilantes who target online CS abusers.

In raising notions of both trends and disease, we find an earlier version of the digital idea of going viral, suggesting that the question of virality is an issue, not just of technology, but of morality. This begs the question of whether the roots of this style of CSA inflected Internet culture can be found, not in the literal history of the wires and Webs that allow us to access such material, but in the cultural archives of comically villainous abusers such as Humbert Humbert and hysterically self-righteous moralisers such as John Ray Junior.

Such cultural representations of CSA should be positioned not simply within the world of the pointing, panicked adult but also alongside the youthful audience that laughs at such hysteria. The paedophile is transformed from a threat against a young person, to a weapon by the technologically literate young person against an adult audience, fearful of both the CS abuser and the seemingly sinister medium of the digital itself.

Thus, the fear of the harm young people can do online, and the fear of harm that can be done to young people online, twist and tangle.

In a text aimed at nervous parents, he explained:. This is evidenced in the passing of the Child Online Protection Act COPA of , which sought to censor explicit material from the view of children [ 30 ]. It should be noted that it especially targeted shock sites such as Rotten. This earlier digital libertarian vision of the obscene should contextualise the lawless mythos of later spaces such as 4chan, the CSA-themed humour it created and the subsequent media panics such work produced. However, in understanding ambiguously humorous representations of CSA, it is also important to recognise how intentionally comic culture, both mainstream and marginal, has previously interacted with notional ideas of the paedophile.

Perhaps what is most relevant to consider here is the use of NAMBLA within comedy routines as a reusable insider joke, with the punchline falling on the innocent outsider, unaware of the abusive undertones those six letters insinuate:.

Such comedy continues this longer cultural history of repurposing traumatic, violent and upsetting images and signalling for insider amusement. Whether in the anti-Semitic, genocidal history of Nazism, or the real world victims of the CS abuser, the emotive impact of these subjects are not extinguished in their subsequent repurposed representations, but rather amplified to encourage outrage for those outside of these subcultural groups.

This humour lies in the exploitation of an innocent audience to publish or present the CS abuser unchecked, inviting them to unwittingly share or even identify with such an abusive figure. Freud equated joke teller to predator and listener to prey in his own writing on the smutty joke [ 39 ]. Working within this theory, the cultural representation of CSA, in this case the joke and its audience engagement with it, is not separate from the event of CSA, but a part of a larger system of violence.

But such power dynamics in a subject as multi-layered as Pedobear are more complex than a top-down system. Therefore, to simplify such engagements within a survivor and abuser structure, with joke telling as a form of trauma transmission, would not do justice to the complexity of digital engagement. What is the context in which the joke teller came to learn about the CSA subject in the first place?

Could the platform of 4chan, which transmits the CSA themed content, be the abuser in this case? This is revelatory of the fact that humorous representations of CSA extends beyond abuser and survivor to questions of generational struggles, traumatic image transmission and technophobia.

This brings us back to Pedobear, where the predator is punch line and parody, an interactive space to ambiguously engage in an imagined, imminent assault. In this system, you are not squeezing the teddy, the teddy is squeezing, or somehow scaring, you. Such anti-cute inversions are found within a longer history of youth culture as comically corrupted childhood cuteness.

The American cartoon series Happy Tree Friends —present which combines cute cartoon animals with graphic violence, and the Japanese character of Gloomy Bear , a pink teddy bear who is often shown attacking children, are two particularly vivid examples of this genre [ 53 ].

Here a young person may display their mature status as having outgrown their teddy bears enough to denigrate them entirely, displaying and consuming the anti-cute as evidence that they are no longer cute themselves. The film degrades childhood innocence and rejects the responsibilities and rigours of adulthood, instead choosing the middle path of male adolescence.

Comedy, after all, is about power; the comic can gain power through trickery, and assert power through humour within social insider groups. But comedy is also about relinquishing power, by momentarily positioning yourself as the abused child, and disrupting power, by switching roles between adult and child.

Thus, the joke teller and listener can be both survivor and abuser, because a joke can travel in multiple directions. The anti-cute Animal Comedy of Ted and Pedobear reflects the struggles of an individual growing up, deciding whether to occupy childhood, adulthood or adolescent, and struggling against the limited meanings of these age categories through play.

This play, as Paul theorises, constitutes not just an individual exploration, but a larger struggle against the concept of adulthood, and the symbolic and structural powers these roles possess. The adult meaning of a childhood symbol is therefore only accessible to those who occupy the Animal Comedy space of adolescent boyhood, which in the case of Pedobear is expressed through what Ryan M.

For the CSA theme is not explicitly evident in the image, the wide-eyed bear, but in the text, or rather the second part of the text, as the Pedobear meme structure relies on a paedophilic punch line generated from the subcultural capital of the viewers. The image, by association, is rendered obscene, itself a sign of its success for the joke teller. This push-and-pull relationship between the rational and the overblown, the simple and the complicated, the mocking and the affirming, the innocent and the criminal, is revelatory of wider online cultures of transgressive social interaction, most notably the act of trolling.

This is the art of wilfully exposing or mocking an unsuspecting user through playfully devious forms of off-topic interaction, and is again associated with 4chan.

It really is as simple and as complicated as that. The bear has been unintentionally included in a range of mainstream media, from a front-page cover story on the Olympics Figure 8 , to a conservative column on U. President Barack Obama in Figure 9. In this setup, each accidental appearance is lauded as a success by those in the know, serving as proof that the predatory Pedobear can infiltrate any respectable situation.

The insider figure of the outlaw online humourist cannot exist without the ignorant outsider, who ironically in the off-line world would be considered the insider.

As Douglas explains:. Users of 4chan and similar sites love to see Pedobear show up in inappropriate places. To the initiated, any picture with a bear and a kid will look hauntingly like a Pedobear attack. In its rigid demarcation between the out-of-touch off-line and the in-the-know 4chan, ignorance of Internet culture is positioned as an active invitation for targeting [ 74 ]. As digital researcher Kate M.

This is evidenced in how Encyclopedia Dramatica revelled in such playful destabilisation of the statuses of innocent and abuser, documenting each victory with glee, serving as proof of normie stupidity against the comedic brilliance of their outsider culture [ 79 ].

The affirmation of their collective identity is situated in the creation of chaos within the moralistic belief systems of others, through infiltrating their image-making with socially taboo themes such as CSA. However, such borders between the mainstream and the marginal are not as clearly defined as these online insiders would like to believe. In outrage, the users anything-goes comic ethos is overturned.

Instead a sense of moralism is returned to engagements with the CSA subject in order to counteract a capitalist consumption of the transgressive culture they sought to build:. Pedobear has the distinction of being one of the first Internet memes to ascend to the level of a plush doll available for online purchase. Another way to accrue pr0fit has been discovered and its [sic] based on little kids being molested.

Your soul — deriving entertainment tertiarily from child sex abuse is no way to win points with the boss, unless you pray to Satan. In which case Kudos! During this period, Pedobear was increasingly out of the control of its original insider audience, due to its newfound commercial interest and decreasing cultural credibility.

However, the case of a student posting an image of Pedobear in a college dorm elevator as an in-the-know visual gag Figure 12 and facing unexpected consequences is perhaps the most vivid testament to this tension between insider and outsider within the Pedobear comic setup.

Here the memetic character as an opportunity for anonymous expression closes. Instead, these characters become attached and embodied by a singular user who is subject to regulation. In this sense, a meme making model of this kind is likely to blow back on the user, when it hinges so heavily on either culturally influencing other spaces to unwittingly adopt these memetic codes or infiltrating these images to mainstream spaces as an act of subversion.

Both acts require exiting the anonymous space of 4chan where such joke telling can most likely be told without consequence.

In the case of the lift prank, when this secret sign making was discovered, the image then became an accusation, with commenters on the post expressing frustration at the way the Pedobear insider humour had grown out of control. This tension of naming and identifying the abuser through incomprehensible insider humour is an important one.

If a joke requires anonymity to be executed but is dependent on entering places where such anonymity no longer applies how can such a form of humour sustain itself? Such an urgency to name is located within the context of digital culture, where Pedobear emerges as affirmation and exaggeration of existing cultural ideas of the online child predator, so utterly unseeable and cartoonishly present. In this sense, Pedobear, in all his contradictions, misunderstandings and constant movements, serves as a bridge between all manner of online media, linking seemingly unconnected spaces, from commercialised cute cartoon animals to institutional abuse, thus creating a cultural reworking of existing generational divides, discontent and misunderstandings.

This, in turn, inverts the existing power structures of the adult abuser and the youthful victim to create a culture of frustration and fear in older individuals for a CSA-coded, technologically embedded, context-specific youth subculture, that is seen as both baffling and frightening to the adult outsider. Peter Applebaum, managing director digital and social media marketing agency Tick Yes, said companies were only in the early stages of understanding how social media works.

There is a history of the Pedobear finding itself way into advertisements, catching the companies off guard. An iPhone app containing the bear was removed from Apple's online store in only weeks after its release. In , police in California rushed to issue a warning after a person appeared at an event dressed in the costume. Pedobear ruins Nestle's Facebook party.