Today's video is sponsored by Grammarly. Hi, and welcome back to me talking about
whatever I want. Today when.... Wait, wait, wait. That's the wrong intro.
Oh boy. K-pop stans are super fans of various Korean pop groups, or at least that's what most
K-pop stans would tell you. But if you ask literally anybody else, then you'll quickly
discover basically nobody likes them. They're known for attacking people, hijacking Twitter
threads. It's a very different picture than your average K-pop fan would give you. So in
this video, I just want to find out which one is it. But first I want to find out about today's
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the video. So in this video, I can't just like declare that all K-pop stans are bad people,
but at the same time, I can't just say K-pop stans aren't that bad because... So I think the best way
to look at it is the good, the bad, and the ugly. But seeing as it's K-pop and literally nobody in
that industry looks ugly it's actually kind of scary, so we'll just look at the good and the
bad. So if you ask anybody outside of the stan base what the single most annoying thing about
K-pop stans are, I guarantee you they would say it's the self-promotion. For context,
K-pop is really obsessed with numbers. And I know being obsessed with charts and data is not
specific to K-pop stans. It's just something that K-pop stans have taken to the next level.
These people have streaming parties, streaming campaigns, special methods of streaming that
vary from platform to platform to make sure they maximize stream. The K-pop artists themselves
play into this by constantly updating their fans on how many streams they're getting. It's to the
point where there are giant fan accounts that exist solely to share K-pop streaming numbers.
And one of them has almost a million followers. So in order to keep these numbers up, many K-pop
stans decided to take the direct approach, which is just spamming all over Twitter for people to
stream their favorite artists. But where it gets annoying is when the K-pop stans start
trying to promote themselves basically. K-pop stans have what are called fan cams, which are
concert recordings of their favorite artists. They spam these fan cams everywhere. Now again,
not everyone does this but it's frequent enough to where... I would be if you managed to go a full
day on Twitter without running into some random Korean pop artist dancing on the timeline. Another
big issue within the K-pop stan community is anonymity. Now, there's nothing wrong with being
anonymous, everyone on the internet has varying levels of anonymity. Then you have people like
your average K-pop stan and they give us nothing. Now, some people will use their real name or their
real picture, but I think the majority of these stans grab a screenshot of their favorite artists
and then slap it over a bio with no identifying information, no identifying information
that can be used to hold them accountable for the legitimately terrible things that
they then proceed to do. Docs people send death threats and they do all this disgusting stuff
while having a profile picture of like Jennie from Blackpink. I've seen fan cams and like
post announcing celebrities deaths. It's things that people would never really do if they weren't
able to hide behind anonymity. All right. The last negative thing I want to look at
is the cancel parties. Basically, people choose a new person to cancel on Twitter every single
and K-pop stans have a lot to do with this. Some of them actually start these hashtags themselves
specifically for the purpose of getting a trending tag that they can then attach their fan cams to.
But moreover, even when these tags kind of start organically for various reasons, K-pop stans will
still proceed to flood these tags that way they can get views off of trending. Besides just being
generally annoying, in my opinion, it kind of weakens the purpose of criticism on Twitter in
the first place because a lot of times people will start trending for very legitimate reasons, but
then a bunch of people will click in only really see K-pop stuff and assume it's not that big of a
deal. So much of the space where the conversation should be happening is just flooded with like the
latest Blackpink music. It's honestly ridiculous. So that's me looking at K-pop stans on Twitter as
negatively as possible. But now let's look at the positive aspects. And you might actually
be surprised. So the first one I want to bring up is the monetary achievements.
By far, these are the most impressive. I'm just going to use BTS and their fan base army as an
example. BTS launched this campaign a couple of years ago with the UNICEF called the love yourself
campaign. If you go to their site, you can see that they've raised over $2 million in donations.
I don't think the average band could generate $2 million worth of donations. By supporting BTS and
hosting these streaming parties and all the stuff I was talking about, these stans are actually
enabling BTS to be this charitable. Another good example was BTS teamed up with the label Big Hit
Entertainment to donate $1 million to crew members who had been affected by the pandemic that's
going around. But most impressive of the monetary achievements by far was BTS's Black Lives Matter
donations and that is because while BTS donated $1 million, which is great, BTS army actually matched
that $1 million donation dollar for dollar. I think it's really cool to see a community
who can come together, not just to support their favorite artists, but to support causes
that matter to make a difference, but not just by posting black squares on Twitter
by opening their wallets. All right. So the next positive is strength in numbers. Basically because
there are so many K-pop stans on Twitter, they can come together in strange and magnificent
ways. As you know, there's a lot of protests going on and people are being unfairly targeted at these
protests by the police. And so the Dallas Police Department thought it would be a great idea to
develop this app that lets you report unlawful activity at the protest. And K-pop stans in an
effort to stop the police from unfairly targeting protestors actually shut this app down. Now you
may be wondering how did this happen? Was it some sort of strategic pre-planned attack?
No, they actually just posted a bunch of fan cams. It was so embarrassing for the police department
that they had to publicly shut it down. So are you starting to see how everything I'm
saying that was bad about them also winds up being good? K-pop stans are effortless
when it comes to shutting down harmful hashtags. Hashtag it's okay to be racist
was trending on Twitter. But, and you might see where this is going, if you clicked into that tag,
it was nothing but K-pop stans attaching their own fan cams to it with messages of anti-racism. So
K-pop stans on Twitter have in a documented way shut down corrupt police app, racist has tags.
This very thoughtful use of the power that comes from having
millions of people in one group is something that I think should be pointed out if you want to have
a conversation about K-pop stans. They even wind up getting media coverage for this sort of thing
when they bought a ton of tickets to a Trump rally and then didn't attend which some people
thought led to a severe over-reporting of numbers for what winds up being a rather disappointing
turnout. Whether they had an effect on it or not, that's just hilarious to me.
I can just envision the next rally seeing that thousands of people signed up but not knowing
how many of them are Gen Z kids just trolling you on TikTok. The last positive I wouldn't
mention is the community. For the most part, a lot of K-pop stans are pretty welcoming to
people who want to join, people who are new in the group. And if you start actually trying to
get a profile of the average K-pop stan, you start realizing that for some people,
this is kind of all they have. For a lot of people this Twitter community that they've built
is their main source of social interaction. And so I think creating an environment where people
do feel free to talk to each other and talk about things that matter is actually really important.
It's something that you don't really see in many other communities if I had to be honest.
All right. So now we come to the verdict. Are K-pop stans good? Are K-pop stans bad? Basically,
my conclusion is we need a different term. I think the K-pop stans like the good ones I mentioned
who tried to shut down racism and donate to good causes and support each other and all that stuff
they can keep the label of K-pop stan. But I think the ones who like dogs people and try to
get people's accounts taken down and send the death threats and all that, they don't deserve
to be called K-pop stans. We need a new name for those people, okay? I'm thinking like K flops?
I don't know. But that's just my opinion on K-pop stans. As you can see, I clearly had a lot to say,
but I'm interested in what you have to say about that. So looks like I've gotten ten minutes of
content out of this, so leave a like, tell me what you think, and subscribe if you haven't
already. Thank you for watching, and a big thank you to my 590,000 subscribers. Okay, bye.