The Global Impacts of K-Pop Fans

The power of K-pop fan mobilization is hard to overstate. K-pop fans have helped change the political tides in Chile, revived a dying facet of Thailand's tourism industry, organized flash mobs as a form of protest, founded grassroots organizations to work on all sorts of issues, lobbied for certain legislation, and even created some of the first-ever fan-run sites. This power to make tangible change has been used for bad as well as good: K-pop "anti-fans" have mobilized to manufacture conspiratorial theories, attack members of different fandoms, and spread misinformation, all of which have caused "real world" harm. The bottom line: the power of K-pop fans extends well beyond the internet. This episode covers stories from the nineties up to the present day, from countries all over the world, that are prime examples of K-pop fans' concrete impacts- the good, the bad, and the ugly.