Digitally-savvy and passionate, K-pop fans' Trump activism should come as no surprise
Over the past month or so, it’s been widely reported to much acclaim that Kpop fans are mobilising in social media spaces to help fight injustice. The majority of this was done thanks to K-pop fans’ savvy and long history of mobilising digitally to support their favourite stars, but that’s just the beginning.
For those not in the know, fans of South Korea’s pop music scene, aka Kpop, first went viral in recent days by engaging in a kind of vigilante activism, as fans across the world supported the Black Lives Matters movement. They did this not only through social media and driving immense donations, but also by taking action to foil police operations aimed at identifying BLM protestors – by urging fans to submit their fancam footage to a US police department – and hijacking racist hashtags.
Last weekend, they gained new levels of attention for their role in Donald Trump’s poorly attended rally in Tulsa. Both TikTok users and Kpop fans – which often overlap – came forward in the aftermath to reveal they had mobilised to request tickets, inflating expectations for turnout. Though the US president’s campaign has denied the impact on the actual turnout, there was no denying the proof individuals shared across social media that these young people had been integral in boosting the pre-announced ticketing numbers.
These two particular incidents resulted in a raft of articles written about the activism of K-pop fans, especially in English-language media. Often, a sense of surprise set the tone of the story as people tried to come to terms with Kpop fan mobilisation. K-pop fans – the latest in a long line of pop music fans being vilified and discredited – have regularly been scorned across Internet spaces as an irritant, dropping fancams seemingly without care and trending hashtags nonstop. Recent events have forced a reckoning with that stereotype.
But it shouldn’t be surprising, because any stereotype of K-pop fans is an inaccurate rendering of a massive amount of people around the world. Though there’s no confirmed number of K-pop fans across the globe, in 2019 the Korea Foundation’s data showed that there were more than 99 million fans worldwide participating in fan clubs dedicated to South Korean culture, including K-pop and K-dramas.
While it’s easy to say “K-pop fans” whenever discussing the movement, it’s not a centralised, formal group it’s individuals who happen to be Kpop fans activating and using their combined values to make something happen. There is huge diversity in this group, some of it good, and some of it bad. Even amid all the recent antiracist activism, Black K-pop fans have been vocal about longterm and ongoing racism in K-pop spaces, with many expressing concern about how this very activism is being received. In fandoms, there is always a breadth of views – Harry Potter’s fandom comes to mind, especially in light of Rowling’s recent transphobic comments.
Contemporary fandoms are very well-suited and well-prepared for the kinds of political activism we’ve seen in recent weeks. K-pop in 2020 is very much about the organisational skills of different fandoms. Who can stream more? Who can buy more albums? How many trends can you trend worldwide in any given month? Organising and navigating digital spaces are old hat for K-pop audiences nowadays.
So for those K-pop fans who are politically inclined, even if they’re unable to attend protests physically, they are able to use the tools they’ve honed for fandom projects to create good.
We saw an example of this when the fandom for BTS, the best-selling artists in South Korean history, who are known as ARMY, joined together to collectively raise $US1m for various Black Lives Matters-associated organisations to match BTS and its company’s, Big Hit Entertainment’s, donation. ARMY surpassed $1m within 24 hours.
We have seen this kind of fundraising power before – raising money for causes as disparate as the Australian bushfire recovery to buying trees and rice for charities across the world.
We saw another example of this when fans rallied together to register for tickets to Trump’s rally. For K-pop fans who regularly engage in mass streaming, buy merchandise in bulk, deal with the chaos that is trying to get the ticket you want for a concert, and numerous other similar sorts of activities, coming up with fake emails and phone numbers to register for a single rally, sometimes requesting hundreds of tickets in one go, proved to be small fry.
More than being the meme of the moment, the recent high-profile examples of activism are the work of the individuals who make up these K-pop fandoms, and there’s no saying what will come next now that fandoms have learned to harness their political power. Nowadays it’s common for K-pop fandoms to create goals to try to break new records, always aiming higher and higher. If that “sky’s the limit” momentum carries into social justice, it means that these instances may just be the tip of the iceberg.
Tamar Herman is a music writer, K-pop correspondent for Billboard and the author of BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears.