How activist K-pop fans are trolling QAnon

While K-pop stans probably didn’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. The seven-member boy band, also known as Bangtan Sonyeondan (“Bulletproof Boy Scouts”), can cut slightly ridiculous figures with their double denims, platform 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 were selling out US stadiums faster than Taylor Swift. Big Hit Entertainment Co, the group’s management company, made $US820 million in an initial public offering on October 14 and is now valued at more than $US4 billion. BTS fans call themselves ARMY, which stands for Adorable Representative MC 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 BTS find their lifestyles and freedom of expression tightly policed – no significant others, no tattoos, no divisive thoughts on politics.

(Although BTS members have managed to bend some of these rules at times, the company also declined to make the band available for comment for this story.) So it was a big deal when, in June, BTS tweeted a brief statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement to its 26 million followers and announced that it had donated $US1 million to the cause. “We stand against racial discrimination,” the band said. “We condemn violence. You, I and we all have the right to be respected. We will stand together. #BlackLivesMatter.”

To some extent, the band was following the lead of its fans, many of whom were already demanding that ARMY take a stand. Millions of BTS fans live in the US and identify as people of colour, according to researchers and surveys of popular fan accounts. Many are over the age of 30, repping Twitter handles like @KpopDad and @MomsNoonas (bio: “Never ever, ever too old to fan-girl”). But ARMY has its share of young people, too. Some professors attribute a recent spike in American college students studying Korean to K-pop fans who want to understand the lyrics of their favourite songs.

Daezy Agbakoba, a recent graduate of London’s Middlesex University who is now back home in Maryland, has a K-pop conversion story that would sound familiar to a 4chan kid radicalised into QAnon. Four years ago, she stumbled onto her first BTS video while watching YouTube. Now, untold hours of algorithmic recommendations later, she’s studying Korean by day and binge-watching the band’s videos at night, her ARMY light stick – a vastly upgraded version of waving a phone flashlight during a concert – resting nearby. “When you get into them, it’s just this steep descent,” she says. “Kind of like how Alice falls down the rabbit hole.”

This spring, Agbakoba was the first to tweet the hashtag #MatchAMillion, imploring her fellow stans to add another $US1 million to BTS’s Black Lives Matter donation. They did so in a little over 24 hours. “It shocked me, because I didn’t realise how much influence we actually had,” she says. Since then, she’s been applying to grad schools and working with other young American ARMY members to rally opposition to Trump and his QAnon adherents. “The state of our country is getting to a really dark place,” she says. “I think it would be important to try and help against that in any way we can.” Or, as a repeated meme posted during the #WhiteLivesMatter keyword squat asks, “Will #Kpop a day keep #QAnon at bay?”

The business of K-pop is largely apolitical, but the genre’s origins are anything but. The modern South Korean mashup of American hip-hop and pop-rock can be traced to 1992. For decades, officials in South Korea had frequently banned new music, movies, books and newspapers with messages deemed outrageous or overly political.

Into the spotlight stepped Seo Taiji & Boys, a try-hard boy band with a punk-rock look. They auditioned for a talent show on one of South Korea’s major TV networks with Nan Arayo (I Know), a hip-hop-influenced song that mashed together rap verses, pop choruses and catchy dance moves. Although the group received the lowest score of the night from the show’s horrified judges, they won the popular vote – the track topped the country’s music sales charts for 17 straight weeks. Seo Taiji and Boys followed up that hit with risqué songs about censorship and youth oppression. When officials threatened to ban their music, fans rioted in the streets.

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A few years later, with South Korea in the grips of the Asian financial crisis, the government reversed tack and embraced pop culture as an economic lifeline, boosting its official culture budget. It began promoting K-pop, along with homegrown dramas and video games, as a core part of the nation’s identity. This was the start of what’s become known as the Hallyu (Korean wave) movement, which eventually swept the country’s pop culture westward.

K-pop stans are tightly linked to the bands and their success. Official fan clubs have long contributed directly to funds set up to support artists through their ramen days. They also coordinate online efforts to boost the acts’ profiles, both through word-of-mouth and by buying extra copies of albums to push them up the sales charts. The advent of social media and streaming made it possible for K-pop acts to turbocharge fan loyalty by producing intimate videos almost nonstop, from short clips of them goofing around backstage to livestreams where they open up about their daily foibles as well as more serious mental health struggles.

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BTS, which made its debut in 2013, expertly synthesised these marketing strategies. ARMY began life as an official fan club, though it has grown much broader as it has fought to penetrate America’s parochial music ecosystem. When US fans began mass-calling hundreds of radio stations to play BTS, they came armed with pre-written scripts for any DJ who hadn’t heard of the band. Grassroots pressure from ARMY put BTS albums on the shelves of Walmart, Target, and Best Buy; landed BTS on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live!; and got them ringing in the New Year with Ryan Seacrest in Times Square. When Ticketmaster put seats for a BTS tour on sale last year, all 300,000 tickets sold out in minutes, then the website crashed from the overload. When band member Jungkook told fans online that he uses a Downy fabric softener scent branded Adorable, two months’ worth of the global supply sold out in a day. And when the band endorsed the Hyundai Palisade last year, the SUV was on back order for months.

Many ARMY members consider BTS their friends and revel in the band’s victories. These include the Big Hit IPO, which made the seven band members a combined $US105 million, and this September’s chart-topping success of the band’s first English-language single Dynamite, which also won four MTV video music awards. South Korea’s culture ministry estimates that the song will contribute $US1.4 billion to the nation’s economy.

The 10-figure haul is a testament to fans like Vivian Herr, a 43-year-old C-suite executive in Silicon Valley who falls asleep with BTS booming through her AirPods. Herr estimates she spent more than $US16,000 on copies of Dynamite to push it up the Billboard rankings, including by sending money to hundreds of people in her Venmo contact list and asking them to download it. When she learned the song had hit No. 1, she politely excused herself from a business meeting, darted into a nearby bathroom, and doubled over, screaming. Herr says her husband and kids don’t really get it.

The video for Dynamite might not make the band’s je ne sais quoi especially obvious. You’ll see seven grown men jiving like it’s 1999 while they sing lyrics like “Dy-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na, life is dynamite.” Asked why they’re so devoted, ARMY members tend to say the same thing, often word for word: “I came for the music, but stayed for the message.” The members of BTS are Unicef ambassadors who support a wide range of charitable causes and stress the importance of self-acceptance. Despite Big Hit’s tight rein, the band also laces many of its lyrics and videos with imperatives to challenge the status quo. “Don’t get trapped in someone else’s dream,” BTS croons in the song N.O, a rejection of workaholic culture.

Two years ago, when arenas were still a thing, Erika Overton rented a car and drove 10 hours from Detroit to New York to see BTS play Citi Field. The then-38-year-old contract recruiter had never been to a live concert before; she brought her 63-year-old mum, who’s also ARMY. “This is not just hysterical girls screaming over guys and thinking of nothing else,” she thought while looking up at her idols, the beat pulsing through her sneakers.

Earlier that year, Overton co-founded One In An Army, which organises monthly charitable-giving campaigns among its 150,000 Twitter followers. They’ve backed causes such as feeding starving children in Yemen and constructing water-treatment facilities in Tanzania. OIAA campaigns typically raised about $US6000 a month until this past June, when Agbakoba made #MatchAMillion trend.

Black Lives Matter posed some uncomfortable questions for the K-pop industry. K-pop idols borrow more than just the kinds of hip-hop beats that originated in the Bronx. They also copy black artists’ hair and clothing styles, dance moves, even mannerisms like a distinctive wag of the finger. ARMY has lost more than a few members uncomfortable with the online backlash to criticism along these lines. “That’s definitely the dark side of the fandom,” says Brie Statham, a 37-year-old BTS fan from Maryland. “It becomes really hard to be a black K-pop fan when you disagree with something like cultural appropriation and you get attacked for it.”

There an expectation that K-pop artists speak up in regards to social issues.

— Jiye Kim

Yet ARMY has also pushed its avatars to take a more active role in the US protest movement. The day after Floyd died under a police officer’s knee in Minneapolis, Jiye Kim, a 26-year-old high school teacher in Sydney who runs one of the world’s biggest BTS fan accounts, woke to a relentless buzzing on her phone. Dozens of her quarter-million followers were demanding that she speak out against Floyd’s murder.

Kim felt more than a little out of her element, not least because she couldn’t point to Minnesota on a map. Her claim to fame is speedy translation of BTS lyrics. When a new album drops, she’ll spend 14 hours translating the songs into English, even if it takes her until 4am on a school night. Soon, though, she was posting educational articles about police brutality in the US. “Not only is there an expectation that K-pop artists speak up in regards to social issues,” she says, “there’s now an expectation that fan accounts do, too.”

A few days before ARMY hijacked #WhiteLivesMatter on Twitter, the Dallas Police Department unveiled a surveillance app called iWatch and asked citizens to send it videos of illegal activity during city protests against police brutality. Instead, stans crashed the app by flooding it with close-up clips of K-pop idols winking at the camera, a flex the cops attributed to “technical difficulties”. And ARMY members who took credit online for ruining Trump’s Tulsa rally posted videos of themselves doing the Macarena in front of their tickets or joking that they couldn’t go because they were walking their plants or feeding their pet rocks.

On the surface, ARMY’s signal-jamming and GIF warfare might seem to echo the unsavoury viral memes that helped drive support for Trump four years ago and laid the groundwork for QAnon. But K-pop stans came first, Wasim Khaled says. He’s chief executive officer of Blackbird.AI, a company governments and corporations hire to analyse digital disinformation campaigns and other forms of social media manipulation. He had to learn how to account for ARMY when developing Blackbird’s algorithms years ago, because the sheer volume of K-pop-related material was throwing off every large data analysis he tried to do. Once he learned what BTS was, it took a while to find a way to filter out the stans’ noise. The ripple effects of QAnon look much the same, he says: “Consider QAnon like conspiracy stans.”

There’s definitely no other group that can go up against QAnon.

— Wasim Khaled, Blackbird.AI

ARMY was somewhat quieter in the presidential race’s waning months than they were in the northern summer. Partly, that’s because the fandom resisted co-option attempts by the Democratic Party mainstream. After Trump’s disastrous Tulsa rally, the Biden War Room, a grassroots outfit seeking to elect the ex-vice president, began tweeting lame “K-pop for Biden” memes and seeking stans’ support, only to earn replies such as “We don’t like you, either” and “hell to the no”.

The fandom isn’t a monolith: it’s leaderless, hard to harness, and divided on the question of what to do next. Overton says ARMY should steer clear of politics to make sure the actions of some overzealous fans don’t backfire on BTS. Herr, in Silicon Valley, says getting involved is a credit to BTS and a part of ARMY’s civic duty. “The Trump administration’s message is racist, and it’s not what we believe or stand for,” she says. With like-minded stans, she’s talked younger and non-English-speaking ARMY members through voter registrations and helped organise get-out-the-vote efforts across California.

Of course, QAnon and similar groups aren’t about to disappear. Now Joe Biden has won the presidency, ARMY’s political engagement could be all the more valuable in countering a fresh wave of revanchist conspiracy theorists, including Trump. Trump’s more paranoid supporters will likely plow additional resources into the strategies that have put QAnon followers on the ballot in several states. Either way, K-pop stans are “the only other online crowd-sourced group that has the same kind of amplification power across social media networks,” Khaled says. “There’s definitely no other group that can go up against QAnon.”

— Bloomberg Businessweek

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Australian Financial Review can be found here ***