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what I find peculiar about the kpop crowd is how they seemingly appear out of nowhere and on-demand on in political topics to drown out/cancel people who don't

what I find peculiar about the kpop crowd is how they seemingly appear out of nowhere and on-demand on in political topics to drown out/cancel people who don't like them or share their values. In Korea a blogger was able to see how BTS fans or "bots" were able to game the music ranking. What's interesting to me is how they seemingly correlate with wumaos as well. I don't have solid evidence but it appears that much of the "stan" (kpop mob on social media) are very much politically aware and push a certain side of the spectrum. All of this makes for some bizarre dynamics and I'm afraid that youngsters who are caught up in the craze don't know that they are being manipulated by very large crowd that behaves in bot like behavior or are herded into specific political flashpoints without understanding the underlying nuances.

the_lonely_road 4y ago
Is this not a generic phenomenon though with no specific relation to Kpop? I was involved in campus recruiting a decade ago and remember distinctly all of the deep discussions the students were having about Kony2012 and what they should do about it during the recruiting dinners. How and why these political flash mobs form online doesn't seem well understood and will no doubt spawn dozens to hundreds of papers over the next few decades examining it.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think youngsters are very nuanced, actually, but their political tactics are adapted to a full acknowledgement of an algorithm as a player in the political landscape game. Take the teenager who took being dunked on by a republican politician for being fat and used it to make herself viral in raising like 700k for abortion. That's not a kid who is caught up in a craze-- that's a kid who is fully aware of how social media functions and is using it to politically outmaneuver opponents. I think they look bizarre, but that's because the landscape they have to "win" in is bizarre. The incentives are twisted and the genz know it.
- upupandup 4y ago
  hmmm I don't know about those particular examples, seem pretty clear cut, and I recognize that they are aware of how to play the game. But what I mean is that certain special interest groups that overlaps with foreign interests seem to be able to continue the youngest and as you put it, the most "apt" userbase to proliferate messaging and goals of that collective. For example, tiktok was recently outed to run keyloggers, and those genz who are "stanning" are also likely sending back all these crucial data points. This is not a conspiracy theory but the very reality that we are dealing with that those who do not share our values and way of life are able to not only cast a wide surveillance of its most vulnerable demographic but manipulate reality for them in all sorts of ways to identify "enemies of the movement" and overwhelm them. What disturbs me most is that there is this disjointed, water-and-oil dynamism between the two political spectrums engaged in this toxic social media warfare aimed at sowing discord and turning its masses to feel ill, with society, stability and question everything we have. It is this unwitting participation by the genz of the grander ulterior motives and agendas highlighted by special interest groups that have overlapping values with foreign states that know what strings to pull and the silence in response that worries me. America's hostile nations know they cannot beat it militarily and they have developed very imaginative and creative asymmetric solutions to subvert and sabotage it from within, and the current state of this side vs that side makes it impossible to formulate a collective bipartisan response to steer the ship in the right direction. We are not taking this issue of weaponized social media seriously and we see this first hand by how little enforcement/recourse there is for data privacy breach. We know that privacy of the individual is one of THE key pillars of open society and unfortunately the waters are murky and there is no guidance anymore. In a few decades we will see what the result of this trojan horse experiment is but the current trajectory is not looking good. Gen Z suffer from the highest rate of mental health issues, have access to unprecedented amount of information and foreign subversion. When I realized your own flag is becoming a symbol of hatred, we reached a potentially irreversible stage of complexity and with that only increases risks.
winternett 4y ago
People don't do that unless they are paid somehow. It's organized activity if you search properly under each time it trends... One or a few accounts will post a keyword or phrase, and then all the subsequent accounts will constantly post with the words spelled exactly the same. Twitter suppresses coordinated activity from many other accounts, and it's against their rules, but somehow they allow it to go on regularly for certain topics like KPOP and BTS, and it results in a lot of streams and album sales only for whoever is trending. This is also likely why Twitter makes it very hard to scroll to tweets at the beginning of when a trend started, and why timestamps are not really shown for the beginning of a trend to the public.
- klausa 4y ago
  This is the most tinfoil hat way to misunderstand young people I've ever seen. People absolutely do that, just because they think it's fun.

the_lonely_road 4y ago

Is this not a generic phenomenon though with no specific relation to Kpop? I was involved in campus recruiting a decade ago and remember distinctly all of the deep discussions the students were having about Kony2012 and what they should do about it during the recruiting dinners. How and why these political flash mobs form online doesn't seem well understood and will no doubt spawn dozens to hundreds of papers over the next few decades examining it.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I think youngsters are very nuanced, actually, but their political tactics are adapted to a full acknowledgement of an algorithm as a player in the political landscape game. Take the teenager who took being dunked on by a republican politician for being fat and used it to make herself viral in raising like 700k for abortion. That's not a kid who is caught up in a craze-- that's a kid who is fully aware of how social media functions and is using it to politically outmaneuver opponents. I think they look bizarre, but that's because the landscape they have to "win" in is bizarre. The incentives are twisted and the genz know it.

upupandup 4y ago
hmmm I don't know about those particular examples, seem pretty clear cut, and I recognize that they are aware of how to play the game. But what I mean is that certain special interest groups that overlaps with foreign interests seem to be able to continue the youngest and as you put it, the most "apt" userbase to proliferate messaging and goals of that collective. For example, tiktok was recently outed to run keyloggers, and those genz who are "stanning" are also likely sending back all these crucial data points. This is not a conspiracy theory but the very reality that we are dealing with that those who do not share our values and way of life are able to not only cast a wide surveillance of its most vulnerable demographic but manipulate reality for them in all sorts of ways to identify "enemies of the movement" and overwhelm them. What disturbs me most is that there is this disjointed, water-and-oil dynamism between the two political spectrums engaged in this toxic social media warfare aimed at sowing discord and turning its masses to feel ill, with society, stability and question everything we have. It is this unwitting participation by the genz of the grander ulterior motives and agendas highlighted by special interest groups that have overlapping values with foreign states that know what strings to pull and the silence in response that worries me. America's hostile nations know they cannot beat it militarily and they have developed very imaginative and creative asymmetric solutions to subvert and sabotage it from within, and the current state of this side vs that side makes it impossible to formulate a collective bipartisan response to steer the ship in the right direction. We are not taking this issue of weaponized social media seriously and we see this first hand by how little enforcement/recourse there is for data privacy breach. We know that privacy of the individual is one of THE key pillars of open society and unfortunately the waters are murky and there is no guidance anymore. In a few decades we will see what the result of this trojan horse experiment is but the current trajectory is not looking good. Gen Z suffer from the highest rate of mental health issues, have access to unprecedented amount of information and foreign subversion. When I realized your own flag is becoming a symbol of hatred, we reached a potentially irreversible stage of complexity and with that only increases risks.

winternett 4y ago

People don't do that unless they are paid somehow. It's organized activity if you search properly under each time it trends... One or a few accounts will post a keyword or phrase, and then all the subsequent accounts will constantly post with the words spelled exactly the same. Twitter suppresses coordinated activity from many other accounts, and it's against their rules, but somehow they allow it to go on regularly for certain topics like KPOP and BTS, and it results in a lot of streams and album sales only for whoever is trending. This is also likely why Twitter makes it very hard to scroll to tweets at the beginning of when a trend started, and why timestamps are not really shown for the beginning of a trend to the public.

klausa 4y ago
This is the most tinfoil hat way to misunderstand young people I've ever seen. People absolutely do that, just because they think it's fun.