The K-Pop Boy Band BTS visits New York in February.
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K-pop stars have been hired to fight racism on Twitter.
On Wednesday, Korean pop music fans flooded the social network with GIFs and video clips of their favorite artists to drown out two racist hashtags created in response to #BlackLivesMatters and #BlackOutTuesday on Tuesday.
“Maybe if you planned BTS more as a racist,” @uriOne tweeted, using slang for extreme fandom, referring to one of the most popular groups in South Korea. The tweet contained a clip of the group dance and the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter.
Other Twitter users have posted photos of bottles of Wite Out correction fluid used in offices around the world to flood another racist hashtag #WhiteOutWednesday.
“Since it’s #whiteoutwednesday, what’s your favorite type of witeout?” asked user @_quizzle__ over a photo of two versions of the Bic product. Quizzle also identified himself as “Kpop Multi Stan”.
The spontaneous efforts to disrupt racist comments on Twitter came after a nightly effort that appeared to have arisen on the 4chan forum to post white squares “on all social media,” an indication of black squares that appeared during Blackout Tuesday- Movement were used. Some users have posted white squares on Twitter. Early Wednesday #WhiteLivesMatter was the third most common hashtag in the U.S., partly because of the rush of K-pop fans to command it.
Twitter has rules against promoting violence or directly attacking people based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other characteristics. The company also does not allow users to post hateful pictures, including the Nazi swastika. Twitter can prevent certain content from being trending when it triggers hatred.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The popularity of racist hashtags seemed to annoy many Twitter users. Photos of all-white cars and home decor, as well as tweets that expressed general disgust at the effort, were released to overwhelm the hashtags. These phrases were used on social media to include related posts from different users in a stream.
Still it was K-Pop Fancam videos that dominated. K-Pop fans also went to Instagram to drown out racist posts, and some of the top posts that #WhiteLivesMatter and #whiteoutwednesday used included videos of members of BTS and NCT Dream.
“Kpop is on the way to adopt the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter,” tweeted user @desirexxii.
@fantasfico proudly tweeted “kpop stans is ruining every white supremacist hashtag. I really love to see it.”
“Whiteout Wednesday is rubbish, but we can improve it with kpop,” tweeted user @danielamonsua.
@pardonyoongi expressed his joy at the success of the K-Pop fans and tweeted “#whiteoutwednesday we did it. It’s now under kpop.”
“I will never hit a K-Pop Stan again,” tweeted user @lizconnorss. “You have taken over the #WhiteLivesMatter and #whiteoutwedneday.”