IF YOU’VE BEEN on Twitter this morning, you may have noticed the name ‘Carter Reynolds’ and the #RespectForCarter hashtag in the Trends bar.
Like a lot of the hashtags that trend on any given day, it was started by fans – but the meaning is a little more sinister than you might expect.
Who is Carter Reynolds, at all at all?
Carter Reynolds is one of the new league of Vine stars – people (mostly teenagers) who have gained a massive following from posting six-second videos online.
Reynolds has 2.39 million followers on Twitter and 4.3 million on Vine, where he mostly posts videos like this:
https://vine.co/v/OmvKdPjOLwZ
Like a lot of Vine stars, he’s now mostly famous for what goes on in his personal life.
And what is that?
It all started one month ago, when a video was leaked online that allegedly showed Reynolds pressuring his then 16-year-old girlfriend into oral sex, despite her repeatedly telling him she didn’t want to.
Reynolds claimed that his iCloud account was hacked, and said there had been a “HUGE misunderstanding” over the contents of the video:
Couples do stuff like that all the time… And no I’m not saying that it was the right thing to do, but it’s the truth. I should have just stopped asking when she said “no” the first time.
He then appeared to go back on the apology, ranting about his ex-girlfriend online and accusing her of cheating on him with his friend.
That did little to stem the huge online backlash against Reynolds, which was exacerbated when he attempted to start up a hashtag defending himself:
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So what has he done now?
Last night, it emerged that Carter had been banned VidCon, a massive conference in California for YouTubers and Vine stars.
Organiser Hank Green (brother of The Fault In Our Stars author John Green) seemingly made the decision after people complained that Reynolds would be a “threat to young girls” attending VidCon, and had him removed from the hotel where the conference was taking place.
Reynolds was obviously not too pleased with this, and tweeted as much:
Jesus. Will it ever end?
Apparently, no. This morning, Reynolds’ fans started the #RespectForCarter hashtag in an attempt to defend him, but were met with much resistance.
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The ever-growing YouTube/Vine community is not short of scandals like these – The Daily Dot has compiled a fairly grim timeline here.
Many people have praised the VidCon organisers for taking the Carter Reynolds allegations seriously:
