Twitter banned a user who shared a modified, racist clip from Disney’s new live action The Little Mermaid Wednesday. The tweaked video turned the skin of singer and actress Halle Bailey, who plays Ariel, from Black to white.
The clip, which was shared earlier this week by user @vandalibm, led to widespread outrage on Twitter, where it quickly started spreading like wildfire. Tweeters were not only flabbergasted that someone had whitewashed Bailey and changed her features, including cartoonishly reddening her hair, but also pointed out the irony that whoever created the clip made no modifications to her voice, seeming to indicate that they found it acceptable.
🎶”Wish I could be part of that AI”🎶 pic.twitter.com/C1V8xogBgq
— Seraphim Rising (@OccupyWpg) September 12, 2022
Unfortunately, there’s more. In the original post sharing the modified video, @vandalibm claimed that the Ariel had been “fixed,” and that the entire movie could also be “fixed” in 24 hours upon its release in May of 2023. Attempting to find the account now returns an “Account suspended” message.
Crediting the video’s original creator, @vandalibm wrote, “He fixed The Little Mermaid, and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl,” @vandalibm said. “He says he can do fix [sic] the entire movie when it comes out with 4x A6000 in 24 hours. It’s over for wokecels.” In a follow-up tweet, @vandalibm stressed that he shared the clip purely for “educational purposes.”
“This is purely for educational purposes, please do not misinterpret this in a racist way,” @vandalibm wrote. “I am just amazed by high-IQ friend [sic] who works with Artificial Intelligence and the stuff he can make, and wanted to show people his field of study.”
This IS pretty educational! For instance, everyone on Twitter learned that @vandalibm and @TenGazillionIQ are racist while these two learned that this shit doesn’t fly on Twitter (at least as evidenced by their accounts being deleted/suspended).
Learning is fun! pic.twitter.com/T5vwM3O3ml
— Corn Maze Cannibal (@socialisthermit) September 13, 2022
Gizmodo reached out to Disney for comment on the modified video and to Twitter for comment on why @vandalibm’s account had been suspended but did not receive responses.
The “he” and “friend” @vandalibm refers to in his tweets is user @TenGazillionIQ, a self-proclaimed Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and computer vision who @vandalibm claims originally made the modified video clip. A tweet @TenGazillionIQ posted on Tuesday in which he addresses new followers he got “from that Ariel thing” suggests that @vandalibm might be telling the truth, but the account itself did not share the edited video. Gizmodo has reached out to the account for comment.
As of Wednesday morning, @vandalibm’s account had been suspended from Twitter. @TenGazillionIQ’s account had not been suspended.
The release of the teaser trailer for The Little Mermaid four days ago, which features Bailey singing “Part of Your World,” has provoked an enormous amount of racist backlash on social media. Bailey posted a video of happy fan reactions to the clip on Instagram on Tuesday.