K-pop as a genre has one of the most fervent fan bases, but more than that, they are organized and impactful. Last month, for example, they managed to crash a police tips app by flooding it with performance videos. While supporters of the current protests have used a variety of hashtags to get their messages across on social media, trolls have tried to counter those messages with hashtags of their own. When that has happened, K-pop fans have been there to help drown these detractors out.
Last week, #BlackOutTuesday took over social media as virtually everybody online posted black squares on their social media pages in solidarity with George Floyd and the protestors who have taken to the streets since his death. The next day, however, 4chan users launched #WhiteOutWednesday, but K-pop fans were having none of that. The hashtag started trending, but K-pop fans quickly took it over by posting images of Wite-Out correction fluid. The same day, like they did with the police tips app, they also flooded the #Qaṇöṇ hashtag with “FanCam” performance videos.
This past weekend, 4chan users were trying to come up with ways to get back at the K-pop community, but considering just BTS’ fans managed to raise over a million dollars in a bit over a day, picking an online fight with K-pop fans is not likely to go well.
Interesting thing here: 4chan posts overnight called for users to get the #whiteoutwednesday hashtag trending overnight, so it would be in Trending Topics when Americans woke up.
Problem is, k-pop fans are also awake, saw it happening, and drowned it out with stuff like this: pic.twitter.com/MjzAaBzcsx
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) June 3, 2020
4chaners this past weekend discussed yet another proposal to retaliate against the K-pop accounts. pic.twitter.com/aqffMOU5YB
— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) June 8, 2020