Social media hatred sends Rebecca Black up the pop charts

Social media hatred sends Rebecca Black up the pop charts
Rebecca Black, a 13 year-old girl from California, has become a pop sensation overnight, after her music video which internet viewers deemed so terrible, went viral.

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Rebecca Black

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Rebecca Black
Why has no Facebook or Google or Apple or YouTube had been launched in Britain?

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Social media.
Emma Barnett
By Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor 4:34PM GMT 21 Mar 2011

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Black has shot to fame in the last seven days after her song, Friday, spread virally across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The teenager was sent by her parents to the Ark Music Factory, a Hollywood-based firm that offers parents the opportunity to turn their children into stars. The company wrote the song for Black, which has since been heavily insulted by millions of people around the world across sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Time.com, the online edition of Time magazine, called the song which talks about life from a teenage girl’s point of view, “a train wreck” and “a whole new level of bad”.

Since the song was released on March 14, Black has become a trending topic on Twitter and had her music video watched on YouTube more than 29 million times, at the time of writing.

She shot past fellow teen sensation Justin Bieber in the iTunes singles download chart at the weekend, reaching a high of 19 in the US version of the chart.
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Her parents are understood to have paid $2,000 to the studios to cover the cost of writing the song and producing the video.

There is already a Wikipedia entry covering Black and her highly-debated single, Friday.

Ark Music chief, Clarence Jey, gave Black the option to remove her music video from YouTube, as the comments across social media sites like Twitter, grew increasingly more hateful. However, she decided against it.

Black told The Daily Beast: “I decided not to give the haters the satisfaction that they got me so bad I gave up… Those hurtful comments really shocked me. At times, it feels like I’m being cyberbullied.”