“ Anonymous K-pop divisions are currently taking down police streams across the United States. That extends to efforts to subsume millions of K-pop fan accounts into the Anonymous collective.
Anonymous has often walked what Coleman refers to as the “line between organic support and illusion.” With the latest convulsions of social unrest in the U.S., the group is “riding on the wave of increased visibility to get its message out,” she said. Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests - to promote a fake one (their alleged hack) and the Anonymous brand, more generally. The bigger story here is the way that Anonymous has once again hacked the public imagination and co-opted a real news event - Mr. “Anonymous was able to manufacture support using fake accounts and by tapping into the K-pop network,” Coleman said. In recent days, the same group has promoted Anonymous accounts and flooded Twitter with fancams to drown out right wing memes and hashtags. But the KPOP network has become more politically active of late: supporting popular protests in Chile as well as causes like Black Lives Matter in the United States.
That network mostly promotes the profiles of favored Korean pop stars, for example by posting short videos (or “fancams”). More interesting is the intersection of Anonymous and the “K-pop Network,” a massive collective of Twitter and other social media accounts operated by fans (sometimes referred to as “stalker fans” or “stans”) of Korean Pop stars. “It did not happen organically,” she said in a phone interview.īot networks account for some of the millions of new followers, Coleman said. Researcher Gabriella Coleman of McGill University says that kind of growth is rare and, in the case of the Anonymous accounts, appears to be manufactured. The same was true with YourAnonNews, which jumped from 1.5 million followers to 6.5 million followers. Specifically, accounts including and saw their social media following explode Twitter following jumped from 170,000 at the end of May to over 5 million followers this week. Researchers have also observed some curious behavior associated with prominent Anonymous social media accounts in recent days. DDoS was certainly a common tactic in attacks attributed to Anonymous over the past decade, but such interruptions could also be explained by organic web traffic, as people around the world go online to follow or respond to Floyd’s death and the events unfolding on the streets of Minneapolis. As for those web site outages? So far there hasn’t been any explanation of the interruption that was coincident with the Anonymous video appearing.