Protesters are leveraging avid fans of Korean pop music to drown out hashtags supporting Donald Trump and pro-police movements on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
- K-pop fans have been enlisted to drown out right-wing hashtags
- Fans of flooded #MAGA and #BlueLivesMatter with K-pop content
- Earlier this week, K-pop fans inundated an app promoted by Dallas police
Political and social activists are flooding right-wing hashtags with posts about Korean pop music as a means of drowning out dissenting voices.
As noted by The Verge, hashtags for MAGA and Blue Lives Matter on Twitter and Instagram have both been co-opted by fans of Korean pop music, typically abbreviated to K-pop, at the behest of activists championing police reform, racial equality, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
As a result of the effort, hashtags designed to promote conservative and sometimes outright racist content have been almost entirely populated with memes and ‘fancams’ that depict K-pop groups and their members singing and performing.
As The Verge notes, In addition to MAGA and Blue Lives Matter, the efforts by K-pop fans have also been focused on more specific purposes like hashtags created by police, specifically #calminkirkland which is meant to draw attention to rioting and lotting in Kirkland, Washington.
Similarly, a search of the hashtag shows a stream of K-pop memes, pictures, and videos.
The tactic has shown similar success earlier this week when K-pop fans swarmed an app being pushed by the Dallas police that was designed to collect people’s videos of ‘llegal activity from the protests.’
Instead, the app was inundated with K-pop videos and was eventually taken down as a result.
K-pop group, BTS (pictured) is among the most popular bands in the genre and has a particularly avid fanbase (stock)
A similar movement this week that attempted to capitalize on hashtags in an effort to promote racial equality and police reform has mixed results, however.
The Black Out Tuesday initiative in which users on instagram and Twitter posted and tagged black squares onto their profiles and other users’ feeds inadvertently buried critical information being sent out by people representing Black Lives Matter.