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  4. K-pop stans are using short videos called fancams to drown out racists online. This is how the movement started.

K-pop stans are using short videos called fancams to drown out racists online. This is how the movement started.

Palmer Haasch   

K-pop stans are using short videos called fancams to drown out racists online. This is how the movement started.
  • Fancams, short videos celebrating K-pop idols, recently came into mainstream awareness when stans flooded racist hashtags like #whitelivesmatter with videos of dancing idols.
  • Fancams on platforms like Twitter have expanded past K-pop fandom, with stans of all varieties making short video edits that circulate on social media.
  • The short videos are used sometimes to promote artists or derail conversation, and have become memes in their own right.

On June 3, several trending hashtags seemed to bear a somewhat misplaced categorization. Amid ongoing Black Lives Matter protests around the world following the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody, three hashtags — #whitelivesmatter, #whiteoutwednesday, and #BlueLivesMatter — were trending under the "kpop" label on Twitter.

The hashtags weren't trending due to a massive influx of sincere posts. Rather, they had been hijacked by K-pop stans who were spamming them with fancams and memes, drowning out any racist posts or rhetoric that may have been taking place.

Fancams — short videos typically depicting K-pop idols performing — have never been more popular, although they've regularly drawn the ire of Twitter users irritated with seeing dancing idols in cancel culture hashtags or under unrelated tweets. However, fancam culture has developed strongly over the past half-decade as stan Twitter has adopted short, flashy videos as a means of signaling fandom allegiance and commandeering hashtags.

Fancams originated in K-pop fandom, but the term has come to encapsulate other short videos and edits

While the term "fancam" has come to signify a broad range of performance videos, edits, and generally short videos wielded by stans of all variations on social media, the term is most closely tied to K-pop fandom. Until recently, "fancam" typically referred to a performance video focused on a specific idol in a K-pop group, although it could also signify video of an idol at a fansign (fan meeting event), an airport, or elsewhere in public.

Recorded by fans, fansites ("professional fans" of sorts who regularly take photos and videos of artists), and occasionally television channels, K-pop fancams are frequently presented in a vertical format, making them perfect for sharing and consuming on mobile devices.

Within the past year, fancams have come to signify more than just K-pop content, however. The term, now widely used across stan Twitter regardless of fandom, could just as easily mean an edit set to TikTok-esque tunes like Flo Millie's "Beef FloMix" — "I like cash and my hair to my ass!" — featuring people like "Parasite" actor Cho Yeo-jeong.

A viral fancam from 2014 arguably set modern fancam culture in motion

In 2014, a fancam of Hani, a member of girl group EXID, performing the group's song "Up & Down" went viral. Posted on YouTube in October by user pharkil, the video of Hani's performance went took off sometime in November, per Seoulbeats.

Prior to the viral video, "Up & Down" hadn't charted very well on South Korea's Gaon chart, falling out of the top 100 within a week of entry. After the fancam, however, "Up & Down" began to chart again in South Korea. EXID started to promote the song again on music shows, eventually notching the group's first music show win, which can make or break a K-pop group. The original Hani fancam on YouTube currently has nearly 32 million views.

The success of Hani's "Up & Down" set in motion what eventually became the fancam culture we know today, where videos of idols hold not only viral potential, but also social currency on platforms like Twitter.

Early fancam culture saw videos attached to tweets like flashy punctuation

In the late 2010s, K-pop fans on Twitter began to tack fancams onto tweets, whether they were talking about an idol performing, sending off a snappy reply, or just tweeting.

Attaching a fancam to a tweet served a few purposes at the time: first, it was a clear way to flex fandom affiliation. In that respect, posting a fancam also allows for the promotion of a member of a group or a specific performance.

Fancams have also served as a way to derail discourse

As Sage Anderson reported in Mashable in July 2019, fancams have sometimes also been used to "derail actual critiques and even constructive discourse," particularly when stans spam fancams in posts or hashtags that aren't even related to their group or K-pop.

Over time, fancams became a staple in cancel culture tags and Twitter users started to expect any #isoverparty hashtag to be rife with fancams and K-pop stans either participating in the cancelation at hand or promoting their faves.

Of course, the promotion aspect still plays into fancam usage even in cancel tags. When a celebrity or public figure gets propped up for cancelation on Twitter, there's typically a chorus of, "well, maybe if you stanned [insert artist]" or something along the lines of "flop, anyways stan [artist]."

The "maybe if you stanned" and "stan [artist]" language was arguably popularized by K-pop memes like "stan Loona," in which Loona fans aggressively promoted the group under popular tweets, no matter if they were related to Loona or not. Used as early as Sep. 2016, the phrase gained traction in late 2017 as Loona stans began to reply to tweets with Loona videos in order to promote the group.

This kind of derailing fancam usage is in large part why locals on Twitter typically express annoyance with fancams and K-pop fandom in general.

Fancams have become so pervasive that they're a meme in their own right

As fancams began to take root outside of K-pop fandom, people began to make edits of characters — typically featuring tunes like the aforementioned "Beef FloMix" or other viral hits like Megan Thee Stallions "Savage" — that typically wouldn't have gotten the fancam treatment. That lead to the "f-ck it, [person/character/etc.] fancam" trend.

Sometimes, individual fancams become memes in their own right. A good example is one fancam of BTS member Suga performing "Seesaw:" while uploads of the fancam appear to have been deleted or lost multiple times on Twitter after racking up millions of views, the video of Suga performing the song in a sparkling red suit is instantly recognizable.

Of course, with great memetic resonance also comes the potential for bait-and-switches: recently, K-pop fans have been organizing to identify certain videos (and the users that post them) that begin as fancams but cut over to gory or otherwise disturbing footage in what's come to be known as the #fancamsituation.

Recently, fancams have come into the spotlight amid recent Black Lives Matter protests

K-pop fans have always been a force to be reckoned with online: they relentlessly stream their faves' music, work to trend hashtags in order to bring attention to new releases, and organize voting campaigns for South Korean music shows or American awards like Billboard's "Top Social Artist." In recent crusades, however, many K-pop stans have come together, regardless of individual fandom, to do what they do best: spam fancams on the timeline.

K-pop stans have recently made headlines amid ongoing Black Lives Matter protests for wielding fancams online in order to try to protect protesters' identities and drown out racist posts.

After the Dallas Police Department put out a call for people to submit video of "illegal activity from protests" via its iWatch Dallas app, K-pop stans called on each other to flood the app with fancams in order to make it difficult for officers to sift through submissions to the app. Soon after, the app experienced an interruption in service, although the Dallas Police Department told Insider in a statement that the cause of the temporary interruption was unknown.

On June 2 and 3, K-pop fans hijacked hashtags like #whitelivesmatter, #whiteoutwednesday, and #BlueLivesMatter on Twitter and Instagram, filling them with fancams and causing them to trend on Twitter with each listed under the "kpop" category for at least a little bit.

At this point, it seems that the Twitter public's opinion on fancams (and in turn, K-pop stans), is beginning to shift from annoyance to begrudging respect. Ultimately, it is kind of funny that videos of dancing idols have become part of drowning out racist rhetoric in digital forums like Twitter and Instagram.

K-pop stans are so readily able to call on a treasure trove of fancams to flood hashtags and police apps because of the way that the trend has developed over the past several years of online fandom. Fancams are only part of stan Twitter's ability to organize, but their recent use builds off of years of stans using them as a means of diverting discussion and flooding online spaces with promotional content.

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