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Bloomberg Businessweek November 2, 2020EE
ven by the standards of U.S. politics
in the accursed year 2020, the wall
of thrusting digital crotches was weird.
One day in June, barely a week after a
Minneapolis police officer murdered
George Floyd and ignited nation-
wide protests, people started tweeting
#WhiteLivesMatter so frequently that it
became one of Twitter’s most popular
hashtags worldwide. The white suprem-
acist phrase is a call to arms within
QAnon, the militant sect that believes
God sent President Trump to defeat a
shadowy cabal of pedophiles and child
traffickers. But the tweets weren’t what
they seemed. Anyone who clicked the
hashtag or typed it into Twitter’s search
bar looking for fellow racists instead
found a rolling stream of video clips fea-
turing Korean boy bands, their pelvises
gyrating below their smoldering eyes
and perfect pastel hair.
More than 22,000 tweets bearing
Korean pop stars flooded hashtags like
#WhiteLivesMatter and #QAnon that
evening, according to market researcher
Zignal Labs. Some typical accompany-
ing text: “Stan twitter RISE.” The bar-
rage effectively commandeered the
hashtag and rendered it all but unusable
to white supremacists. QAnon devotees
are familiar with this tactic, known as
keyword squatting, because they use it
all the time. “They got beaten at
their own game by Korean pop
fans,” says Mike Rothschild, a
conspiracy theory researcher
who’s writing a book about
QAnon. “I’d never seen any-
thing like it before.”
K-pop stans have. Stan
culture takes its name from
the titular character in an
old Eminem song about a psychotically
obsessed fan. Often, stanning means
pumping up YouTube view counts on
new music videos or voting for a band
in numbers high enough to crash which-
ever website is soliciting votes for an
award. Other times, it can cross the line
into group harassment of a preferred
celeb’s perceived enemies.
When that happens, it can feel to
targets like they’re being trolled by
QAnon—ask anyone who’s crossed theBeyhive or the Swifties
and lived to post about
it. K-pop stans, in the
years they’ve spent
organizing online,
have been known to
swarm critics who’ve
described their favor-
ite genre’s deep debts
to Black music as cul-
tural appropriation.
They’ve also relent-
lessly bullied anyone
who’s criticized or
made lewd comments
about their idols
online. More con-
ventionally, they’ve
overwhelmed the
phone lines at hun-
dreds of U.S. radio
stations by calling
en masse to demand
airplay for the latest
single by Blackpink or
Monsta X.
In the past few
months, Trump sup-
porters have started to
understand how those
radio producers feel.
K-pop stans have reg-
ularly hijacked QAnon
and MAGA social media hashtags.
They’ve led get-out-the-vote
efforts against the pres-
ident. And many were
among the online prank-
sters who boasted about
helping derail a Trump
rally in Tulsa where he’d
said 1 million people planned
to show up, and barely 6,000
did. It’s tough to know how many
of the 13,000 unused seats were meant
for stans who’d asked for tickets with
no intention of going, but the emptyish
stadium infuriated Trump and came to
be seen as a turning point in the pres-
idential campaign. While K-pop stans
probably won’t swing the election, their
trolling is enough of a cultural force that
political consultants have taken notice.
The stan activism has been dominated
by fans of BTS, the kings of K-pop. Theseven-member boy band, also known
as Bangtan Sonyeondan (“Bulletproof
Boy Scouts”), can cut slightly ridiculous
figures with their double denims, plat-
form sneakers, and cotton-candy pink
hair. But they’re the first group since the
Beatles to release three Billboard-chart-
topping albums in a year, and they’re
also the most tweeted-about band on
Earth. Before Covid-19 hit, BTS was sell-
ing out U.S. stadiums faster than Taylor
Swift. Big Hit Entertainment Co., the
group’s management company, made
$820 million in an initial public offer-
ing on Oct. 14 and is now valued at more
than $4 billion. BTS fans call them-
selves ARMY, which stands for Adorable
Representative M.C. for Youth. (Clearly,
they really wanted to spell ARMY.)
Big Hit markets its straightedge
Disney princes extremely carefully.
Like most K-pop acts, the members of