In Korea a blogger was able to see how BTS fans or "bots" were able to game the music ranking. What's interesting to me is how they seemingly correlate with wumaos as well.
I don't have solid evidence but it appears that much of the "stan" (kpop mob on social media) are very much politically aware and push a certain side of the spectrum.
All of this makes for some bizarre dynamics and I'm afraid that youngsters who are caught up in the craze don't know that they are being manipulated by very large crowd that behaves in bot like behavior or are herded into specific political flashpoints without understanding the underlying nuances.
For example, tiktok was recently outed to run keyloggers, and those genz who are "stanning" are also likely sending back all these crucial data points. This is not a conspiracy theory but the very reality that we are dealing with that those who do not share our values and way of life are able to not only cast a wide surveillance of its most vulnerable demographic but manipulate reality for them in all sorts of ways to identify "enemies of the movement" and overwhelm them.
What disturbs me most is that there is this disjointed, water-and-oil dynamism between the two political spectrums engaged in this toxic social media warfare aimed at sowing discord and turning its masses to feel ill, with society, stability and question everything we have.
It is this unwitting participation by the genz of the grander ulterior motives and agendas highlighted by special interest groups that have overlapping values with foreign states that know what strings to pull and the silence in response that worries me.
America's hostile nations know they cannot beat it militarily and they have developed very imaginative and creative asymmetric solutions to subvert and sabotage it from within, and the current state of this side vs that side makes it impossible to formulate a collective bipartisan response to steer the ship in the right direction.
We are not taking this issue of weaponized social media seriously and we see this first hand by how little enforcement/recourse there is for data privacy breach. We know that privacy of the individual is one of THE key pillars of open society and unfortunately the waters are murky and there is no guidance anymore.
In a few decades we will see what the result of this trojan horse experiment is but the current trajectory is not looking good. Gen Z suffer from the highest rate of mental health issues, have access to unprecedented amount of information and foreign subversion. When I realized your own flag is becoming a symbol of hatred, we reached a potentially irreversible stage of complexity and with that only increases risks.
This is also likely why Twitter makes it very hard to scroll to tweets at the beginning of when a trend started, and why timestamps are not really shown for the beginning of a trend to the public.
People absolutely do that, just because they think it's fun.