Bieber fans: They're delightful

Had an interesting brief chat on Twitter yesterday with a couple of Bieber fans, one of whom had shown her anger at the paparazzi invasion of Justin's personal space with cameras by, erm, posting a photo snatched of him walking down the street.

Apparently I was wrong to think there might be something ironic in snatching a photo of a man looking pissed off to show how pissed off he was with people snatching photos of him. It's different because "Justin loves his fans".

Talking of whom, those fans did another great job of covering themselves in glory earlier this month.

A fifteen year-old girl from Portsmouth posted a tweet:

Not really a fan of Justin Bieber but his acoustic album is really good!

Justin (or, let's be honest, "Justin") saw this Tweet and was pleased. If it actually was Justin, he thought something like "that's a nice thing for someone to say"; in the more likely scenario that it was a person in the social network marketing arm of Bieber Inc, they thought "this Tweet shows a valuable push-through into a wider demographic suggesting a longer term serious artist strategy could pay dividends". Whatever happened, the tweet got retweeted into Justin's official Twitter account.

Whereupon, Justin's fans thought "hey, that's great - the artist we love and care about has managed to win over someone with his talent. In a way, that validates our belief in him as a musician."

Or so you might have hoped.

Instead, a bunch of bitter vitriol was unleashed on the girl. She told The News (Britain's most lazily-named local paper) what happened:

'It wasn’t too bad at first.

‘Some people were saying I was lucky I was retweeted by him and some were jealous.

‘But then it started to get worse as more people found out. I had things like “you’re not a fan, go kill yourself”.’

Soon after that, messages started circulating that Courtney was dating the Canadian pop star – and pregnant with his child.

Courtney added: ‘It was getting completely out of hand. So far things hadn’t got to me. But then they started saying I was pregnant with his child, and that my child would be a prostitute.’

One girl who sent Courtney messages claimed to be a 12-year-old fan from America.

She put: ‘Just tell her to die and leave Justin alone.’

Yes, that's a non-existent child from a non-existent relationship being projected into prostitution because its mother happened to like a record.

If Justin really loves his fans, he's got terrible, terrible taste in people.