A timeline of K-pop fandom's viral digital activism, from reserving no-show tickets for Trump's Tulsa rally to spamming racist hashtags

After Lady Gaga and K-pop girl group Blackpink released Sour Candy, a single off of Gaga's recent album Chromatica, groups of Blackpink fans worked to stop the #SourCandy hashtag from trending. Typically, K-pop fandoms deliberately organize to trend hashtags around their faves releases in order to drum up publicitly. However, Sour Candy was released on May 28, just days after George Floyd was killed in police custody on May 25. Several Blackpink fanbases came together to encourage fellow Blackpink fans to not use the #SourCandy hashtag and instead support the #BlackLivesMatter tag. Other K-pop fandoms worked to stop their own trending hashtags, encouraging each other to work to get #BlackLivesMatter trending again as well.Music, in general, brings us happiness, but how do we celebrate such occasion knowing that people are being harassed and killed for the most unjustifiable reasons, Blackpink Asia told Insider at the time, speaking on behalf of several Blackpink fanbases. Our favorite artists' music will forever be out there, but the life of the victims won't.Amid the national civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd, the Dallas Police Department put out a Twitter call around midnight on May 31, asking for people to report illegal activity from the protests on its iWatch Dallas app.K-pop stans immediately got wind of this and teamed up to spam the app with fancams. Fancams are short videos often seen in reply comments on Twitter, though the video doesn't necessarily correlate with what has been tweeted. K-pop stans are known for responding to Tweets with fancams, with videos typically depicting K-pop artists performing songs. The effort to flood the iWatch Dallas app with fan cams started with a tweet from @7soulsmap, which was initially a screenshot of the tweet made by the Dallas Police department, with an added caption that called for people to censor the face of protestors to avoid being caught by authorities online, such as with the iWatch Dallas app. The account later tweeted that The only reason to post fancams in 2020 is to protect the identities of BLM protestors [sic].From there, K-pop stans got into action and began to download the iWatch Dallas app and flood it with fancams. They also left negative reviews for the app in the Apple store and by 6 pm CT, the app had crashed. When Insider asked how the app crashed, the Dallas Police Department did not provide a comment. After spamming the Dallas Police Department, K-pop stans decided to flood out Twitter and Instagram hashtags such as #whitelivesmatter and #bluelives matter, which are responses meant to debase the #blacklivesmatter movement. On Wednesday, June 3, the hashtags of #whitelivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, and #whiteoutwednesday, were flooded with K-pop fancam content. Eventually, those phrases began trending alongside the term K-pop and #kpopstans. People online took to social media to express their support — and surprise — at the way that K-pop stans banded together to target the hashtags, and began creating memes to make fun of those who tried to use the #whitelivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, and #whiteoutwednesday as a rebuttal to #blacklivesmatter. After Variety reported on June 6 that Korean boy group BTS had made a $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, their fandom, ARMY, decided to try and match the contribution. One day later, ARMY had raised over $1 million for organizations including Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and Reclaim the Block.The #MatchAMillion campaign began after news of BTS' donation broke. Fans circulated a Carrd website made by charity-focused fan collective One in an ARMY, which contained a link to split donations between different organizations through ActBlue. One in an ARMY tracked donations for the campaign, saying in a statement that donations had stood at approximately $50,000 in the four and a half days since the trackable split donation was launched on June 1. By late evening on June 7, the day after news about BTS' donation broke, donations had surpassed $1 million. These kinds of things are not usual, Erika Overton, who does outreach and communications for One in an ARMY, told Insider. But when BTS themselves actually make a statement… that's like pouring rocket fuel on a fire that's already burning. So when they did their donation, [ARMY] was like, heck yeah, we're doing this.Donald Trump's rally was held in the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The arena has the capacity to hold over 19,000 but only 6,200 people showed up to Trump's event. This happened, despite the fact that his campaign touted that over 1 million people had requested tickets, as Business Insider previously reported. Enter K-Pop stans and TikTok Teens. The two bases (which often overlap) teamed up to reserve tickets for Trump's rally, despite having no intention of showing up. It was free to reserve tickets to the rally, so K-pop fans urged people to reserve a ticket and prank the campaign, Business Insider's Tom Porter reported. Donald Trump's campaign denied reports that TikTok users and K-pop fans were responsible for his low audience turnout, however, anonymous sources to the New York Times that many people who reserved tickets for the event were indeed not real Trump supporters but pranksters. Read more:K-pop stans have been heralded as digital heroes for fighting racists online, but Black fans are still getting left out of the conversationK-pop stans are using short videos called fancams to drown out racists online. This is how the movement started.K-pop stans flooded the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter and Instagram with fancams and memes to drown out racist postsDallas Police asked people to report illegal protest activity via an app. K-pop stans organized to spam it with fancams instead.

A timeline of K-pop fandom's viral digital activism, from reserving no-show tickets for Trump's Tulsa rally to spamming racist hashtags

In late May, some K-pop fans tried to stop fandom hashtags from trending out of respect for #BlackLivesMatter.

Another way K-pop stans proved their power was by flooding the Dallas Police Department's iWatch Dallas app.

K-pop fans also took over hashtags like #whitelivesmatter by spamming them with fancams.

BTS' ARMY matched the group's $1 million Black Lives Matter donation in approximately a day.

K-Pop stans also teamed up with TikTokers to reserve tickets for Donald Trump's comeback rally on June 20 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, despite having no intention of actually attending the event.