This post has been updated since it was originally posted to correct information about the OneInAnArmy charity fanbase, including the year in which it began operating.

On the ground in Tulsa, Oklahoma, something was clearly amiss. Trump for President Campaign manager Brad Parscale had Tweeted on Monday, June 15, that the campaign received over 1 million ticket requests for the President’s first in-person campaign event since March. The campaign hastily planned for two addresses: one to the capacity crowd inside the 19,000 seat arena and another to overflow crowds outside - crowds that never materialized.

I trolled a man In Tulsa, just to watch him cry

What happened? According to some media accounts the K-pop network happened. Again. In the wake of the Tulsa rally, published reports say that legions of Korean pop fans on platforms like Tik Tok and Twitter joined with other online pranksters, sharing a link to reserve tickets for the Tulsa event and RSVPing to an event they had no intention of attending.

The Tulsa rally would be just the latest online protest by what’s loosely referred to as the K-pop network of Korean pop music fans. Those fans have increasingly deployed skills honed over the years promoting their favorite acts in a series of potent online protests: supporting the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. and anti-government protests in Chile in 2019.

Crushes to “Crisis Carrds”

And the signs are that activism like that around Black Lives Matter is on the rise among Korean pop fans. Erika O., a U.S. based K-pop fan who is part of a group of 20 volunteers behind the Twitter account , says that the group is just a small subset of the much larger “ARMY” of fans supporting the Korean band BTS. (“ARMY” in the context of the Korean pop scene is an acronym of “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth.”) K-pop fan groups including OneInAnArmy have already helped fund some 600 charity projects globally and stand at the “intersection of charity and activism,” she said

Erika, who declined to give her full last name, said that she was an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement in the past, but fell for BTS and joined its legions of loyal fans only at the end of 2017. The OneInAnArmy Twitter account, which launched in March 2018 has about 133,000 followers and serves as the face of a subgroup of BTS fandom that is devoted to charitable causes.

The idea to create a “charitable fanbase” within the larger BTS ARMY came out of the realization of the collective power of fandom. “We could see how we could just blow something out of the water,” she said. “We could cause a product to sell out immediately or break the Internet voting. For Erika, OneInAnArmy was about saying “We have a platform. What’s the next level? Where is this going?”

The answer to that question was “everywhere.” In recent months, the group raised more than $1 million to support social justice in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests. It has also supported a range of less visible causes including supplying disaster aid to communities in El Salvador affected by a deadly hurricane and in India, where the COVID virus is combining with an active cyclone season to sow chaos.

For each cause, OneInAnArmy volunteers create “Crisis Carrds” - online collections of links to established charities and NGOs with a track record in working to further the specific cause to which fans can direct financial support or volunteer. The Crisis Carrd for Black Lives Matter, for example, contains links to organizations like Color of Change, the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The Next Anon?

The K-pop network’s growing activism and its involvement in online pranks bear similarities to the evolution of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. That group emerged from online forums like 4Chan a decade ago to engage in increasingly audacious actions (or “Ops”) against targets like The Church of Scientology, the government of Iran as well as financial services companies Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.

“Their trajectory seems like early 4Chan,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “Anonymous also started to hook into political intervention in part because they saw their own power,” said Coleman, who recalled the group’s campaign against right wing commentator Hal Turner in 2006 and 2007. Korean pop fan groups like BTS ARMY appear to have had a similar revelation about the power of their numbers.

The two groups have occasionally bumped up against each other. Anonymous got a boost from K-pop fans in recent online protests over the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department.

But interviews with K-pop activists and those who study the Korean pop fan phenomenon suggest that comparisons between Anonymous and the K-pop network only go so far, and that it is unlikely that K-pop will engage in the kinds of disruptive attacks that became Anonymous’s calling card.

K-pop’s Family Ties

For one thing, Korean pop fandom is not a new or emergent phenomenon. “A lot of the attention we’re seeing with K-pop and BTS fans are activities that they’ve been doing for a long time (but) for the general public its one of the first times we’re seeing it highlighted” said Nicole Santero, a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada who runs the Twitter account, which counts around 45,000 followers.

K-pop fandom is huge and diverse, but some common threads and core beliefs tie the community together, wrote Cedarbough Saeji, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University’s Institute for Korean Studies. “There is a rhyme and reason, these are young socially progressive LGBTQ-friendly, often BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) who would care about those issues even if they weren't also K-pop fans,” she wrote.

Beyond that, K-pop fandom creates what Saeji calls “parasocial kinship” between idols and fans. “Fans often do things for idols or support idols in a way you might loyally support your own family,” she wrote in an email message.

That close identification with their artist may ultimately keep K-pop fandoms like BTS Army from engaging in the kind of destructive pranks and protests and “Ops” that came to define Anonymous a decade ago.

“What I think and love about (BTS) ARMY is we kind of have an unspoken rule: that we’re kind of the public face of BTS,” said Erika of OneInAnArmy. “Our actions are a reflection of the artists we are supporting..and we’re responsible for their name.”

Activism, not Ops

Being K-pop fans has also taught them important lessons about how to organize and get things done online, Saeji said. “If you can get enough of the mass moving in one direction, the rest will probably follow.”

And that may lead to more activism by the Korean pop network in the future. “Fandoms are built on these characteristics that really make them perfect activists and creators of change,” said Santero of UNLV. “The capacity for them to unite and rally over certain issues is already established as part of fandoms. The people that make up fandoms are super passionate and fight for what they love and care about. Those are characteristics that can translate very well to efforts that are aimed at making an impact on social issues,” she said.

As for the K-pop fans like Erika of OneInAnArmy, while they don’t see the group going in the direction of Anonymous, they don’t rule it out either. “I don’t know where things will be going in the future. There are so many ways this can go,” she said. “If (BTS) ARMY gets passionate about something and people get on board and see how they can help, often things just kind of blow up.”

Source: Forbes

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