Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
With the ongoing protests in America sparked by the murder of George Floyd, activism is now at a level I have never even come close to experiencing before, and that also leads to elevated tensions online. Well, as it turns out, K-pop fandoms full of young, diverse, online savvy, progressive, fanatics can be galvanized for good, as many are finding out at the moment.
The things that are gaining attention started almost a week ago with one tweet about an app for Dallas police.
In the replies, you can see what K-pop stans did.
In response to the tweeted request from Dallas Police, hundreds of K-pop fans replied with photos and videos of their favorite artists. Many people also claimed to have submitted videos of the police harming protesters, as well as fan edits of K-pop artists, to the iWatch Dallas app.
That took the app offline.
That led to people mocking them under that tweet.
Aside from a minority of bootlickers who think people really only report serious things and police would only use the information for good, things were extremely well received and for good reason.
“I feel like many people share the same sentiments in regards to how they view excessive use of force by law enforcement with protesters and how the general trust in them from the public has withered,” @7soulsmap said. “Black Lives Matter PERIOD.” @7soulsmap added that many people who talked about submitting photos and videos of police brutality also noted that they would censor the faces of protesters from these uploads. Police departments around the country often have access to a variety of surveillance tools that can be used to target protesters. The Minneapolis Police Department, for example, has used the facial recognition tool Clearview AI — which scraped billions of photos of people from social media to power its face-matching algorithm — more than 160 times. Facial recognition could be used to identify protesters depicted in pictures or videos posted on social media, or captured on CCTV cameras or home surveillance cameras, like Ring. “I’m happy to see how many people are willing to help the protesters keep their identities hidden and stay safe,” @7soulsmap said.
Correct.
They then did the same with Grand Rapids.
And when racists tried to respond to the #BlackoutTuesday tag on Instagram in solidarity with protests with #WhiteoutTuesday, K-pop fans destroyed that with relative ease.
That also gave people another idea, which was take over the racist hashtags on Twitter and take it over. When #WhiteLivesMatter started trending in response to #BlackLivesMatter, K-pop stans were on the case.
Oops.
That then spread to other tags as well.
There’s valid concern that taking over the tags when they’re not already trending is counter-productive on Twitter, and that makes sense so I’d press pause on starting anything.
That said, if they’re already up there for whatever reason, then at least ruining it for those racist fucks is as good as it’s gonna get. Like this from moments ago.
Amazing.
This has led to a surprising amount of coverage, including from this morning on Good Morning America.
That seemingly prompted Jordan Peele to shout us out.
2020 is a hell of a year. The simulation does not give a fuck.
There’s valid criticism about not hearing enough from Black voices on the matter of the K-pop response to anti-black racism, that they have their own anti-blackness within their fandoms, and that some make a serious issue like this a fandom competition. Fandoms are generally a mess, we always cover that, but it’s honestly rather nice to get positive press and do good for once.
And I think the most important thing that I’ve seen from all this is not just the memes and what not, but that K-pop stans genuinely have been speaking out loudly in support of the protests, as well as raising money for the movement at large.
Hell, even look at the comments of some of these free ways to raise money even if you don’t have enough to donate. K-pop fans are doing tutorials on how to manipulate YouTube views like they do for music videos.
I knew the propensity of K-pop stans to do targeted harassment and get their faves to the top by any means necessary could be used for good some how. And I can’t believe it’s actually made me (temporarily) stop hating the fancams.
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