- K-pop superfans have turned to social-media activism with actions like drowning out racist hashtags and spamming a police app with fancams.
- After joining TikTok teens in claiming to have helped inflate expectations for President Donald Trump's comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the K-pop stans are back in the spotlight.
- Recent events have contributed to their new reputation online. Here's a timeline.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
K-pop superfans have been heralded recently as unlikely heroes in the fight against online racism in the wake of George Floyd's killing and Black Lives Matter protests.
Now, members of the sizable K-pop fandom — which is actually better described as a collective of individual fandoms focused on idols like BTS or Blackpink — have gained widespread attention for turning their focus on President Donald Trump, mounting a campaign (along with TikTok teens) that they say helped inflate expectations for Trump's rally over the weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by reserving thousands of tickets and not showing up.
A series of flashy, viral moments that seemingly showed K-pop stans (particularly on Twitter) repurposing fandom tactics to troll racists, police departments, and now the president have caused a kind of paradigm shift in the way the fandom is perceived online. Once local Twitter's annoying adversaries, K-pop fans are now being heralded by some as heroes.
—♡︎ gigi ♡︎ (@gigi_hadidn_t) June 3, 2020
Reactions have typically included surprise, given the fandom's recent elevation into the news cycle. In reality, K-pop fans took actions in support of Black Lives Matter before many of their idols did. Past that, the structure and size of K-pop fandoms in particular mean they can mobilize on platforms like Twitter at the drop of a hat.
That being said, just because the fandom has cemented itself in the public consciousness as a series of fancam-happy, anti-racist digital watchdogs doesn't mean racism doesn't persist within the fandom itself. Several Black K-pop fans told Insider about ways they said they experienced anti-Blackness in K-pop stan communities and how recent discourse had erased Black fans' voices from the conversation.
While the vigilante narrative overshadows a much more nuanced reality, it's exploded over social media and mainstream news over the past several weeks. Here are the events that led to K-pop fans' new reputation as the stans you can call when you need to get things done.
In late May, some K-pop fans tried to stop fandom hashtags from trending out of respect for #BlackLivesMatter.
After Lady Gaga and the K-pop girl group Blackpink released "Sour Candy," a single off of Lady Gaga's recent album "Chromatica," groups of Blackpink fans worked to stop the #SourCandy hashtag from trending. Typically, K-pop fandoms deliberately organize to trend hashtags around their faves' releases to drum up publicitly. "Sour Candy" was released May 28, however, just days after George Floyd was killed in police custody on May 25.
Several Blackpink fan bases came together to encourage fellow Blackpink fans to not use the #SourCandy hashtag and instead support the #BlackLivesMatter tag. Other K-pop fandoms worked to stop their own trending hashtags, encouraging one another to work to get #BlackLivesMatter trending again as well.
"Music, in general, brings us happiness, but how do we celebrate such occasion knowing that people are being harassed and killed for the most unjustifiable reasons," Blackpink Asia told Insider at the time, speaking on behalf of several Blackpink fan bases. "Our favorite artists' music will forever be out there, but the life of the victims won't."
Another way K-pop stans proved their power was by flooding the Dallas Police Department's iWatch Dallas app.
Amid the national civil unrest sparked by Floyd's death in Minneapolis, the Dallas Police Department put out a Twitter call at about midnight on May 31 asking for people to report "illegal activity from the protests" on its iWatch Dallas app.
K-pop stans immediately got wind of this and teamed up to spam the app with fancams. Fancams are short videos often seen in reply comments on Twitter, though the video doesn't necessarily correlate with what has been tweeted. K-pop stans are known for responding to tweets with fancams, typically with videos depicting K-pop artists performing songs.
—ًallie (@YGSHlT) May 31, 2020
The effort to flood the iWatch Dallas app with fancams started with a tweet from @7soulsmap, which was initially a screenshot of the tweet made by the Dallas Police Department, with an added caption calling for people to censor the face of protesters to avoid being caught by authorities online, such as with the iWatch Dallas app.
The account later tweeted, "The only reason to post fancams in 2020 is to protect the identities of BLM protestors."
From there, K-pop stans got into action and began to download the iWatch Dallas app and flood it with fancams. They also left negative reviews for the app in the Apple store and by 6 p.m. CT, the app had crashed.
When Insider asked why the app crashed, the Dallas Police Department did not provide a comment.
K-pop fans also took over hashtags like #whitelivesmatter by spamming them with fancams.
After spamming the Dallas Police Department, K-pop stans decided to flood out Twitter and Instagram hashtags such as #whitelivesmatter and #bluelives matter, which are responses meant to debase the #blacklivesmatter movement.
On Wednesday, June 3, the hashtags of #whitelivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, and #whiteoutwednesday, were flooded with K-pop fancam content. Eventually, those phrases began trending alongside the term "K-pop" and #kpopstans.
People online took to social media to express their support — and surprise — at the way K-pop stans banded together to target the hashtags.
—nobrowsnya (@nmoody469) June 3, 2020
BTS' ARMY matched the group's $1 million Black Lives Matter donation in approximately a day.
After Variety reported on June 6 that the Korean boy group BTS had made a $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, the group's fandom, known by the acronym ARMY, decided to try to match the contribution. One day later, ARMY had raised over $1 million for organizations including Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and Reclaim the Block.
The #MatchAMillion campaign began after news of BTS' donation broke. Fans circulated a Carrd website made by the charity-focused fan collective One in an ARMY, which contained a link to split donations between different organizations through ActBlue. One in an ARMY tracked donations for the campaign, saying in a statement that donations had stood at approximately $50,000 in the 4 1/2 days since the trackable split donation was launched on June 1. By late evening on June 7, the day after news about BTS' donation broke, donations had surpassed $1 million.
"These kinds of things are not usual," Erika Overton, who does outreach and communications for One in an ARMY, told Insider. "But when BTS themselves actually make a statement … that's like pouring rocket fuel on a fire that's already burning. So when they did their donation, [ARMY] was like, heck yeah, we're doing this."
K-Pop stans also teamed up with TikTokers to try to embarrass President Donald Trump.
Trump's rally was held in the BOK Center in Tulsa. The arena has a capacity of more than 19,000, but only an estimated 6,200 people showed up to the event.
Though that might not necessarily be surprising during a coronavirus pandemic, the turnout was far below expectations, as the Trump 2020 campaign had said over 1 million people had requested tickets, as Business Insider previously reported.
Enter K-pop stans and TikTok Teens. The two bases (which often overlap) teamed up to reserve tickets for Trump's rally without any intention of showing up. It was free to reserve tickets to the rally — entry was first come, first served — so K-pop fans urged people to reserve a ticket and prank the campaign, Business Insider's Tom Porter reported.
—Brandon Levesque (@brandonlevek) June 21, 2020
Anonymous sources with the Trump campaign told The New York Times that many people who reserved tickets for the event were indeed thought to be pranksters.
- Read more:
- K-pop stans have been heralded as digital heroes for fighting racists online, but Black fans are still getting left out of the conversation
- K-pop stans are using short videos called fancams to drown out racists online. This is how the movement started.
- K-pop stans flooded the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter and Instagram with fancams and memes to drown out racist posts
- Dallas Police asked people to report illegal protest activity via an app. K-pop stans organized to spam it with fancams instead.