K-Pop Fans Flood Dallas PD's App to Help Protect BLM Protesters Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jun 1 2020

Location: 

Online

Early Sunday morning, the Dallas Police Department's Twitter account tweeted for followers to download its iWatch Dallas app and share videos "of illegal activity from the protests." The police are looking to arrest lawbreakers at weekend demonstrations decrying police violence against black people. The benefit of the app, according to the tweet, was the ability for informants to stay anonymous.

Within hours, people began retweeting the message and adding a request to send in "fancams," a term used to describe video edits made by zealous fans, aka "stans," that are focused on one band member during a group show — a popular trend among K-pop fans. Their aim was to flood the app with nonsense in order to distract the police from arresting anyone at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Soon music stans began flooding the app with fancams and bad reviews, like "THIS APP GAVE ME A VIRUS!!!!!" or "Terrible cop app." As of late Sunday night, it had 516 reviews and an average score of 1.1 stars out of 5. DPD soon tweeted that the app was "down temporarily."

External sources: 

https://www.newsweek.com/kpop-spamming-fancams-grand-rapids-police-department-pr…
Posted by Sing on May 6 2024

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Provides (a useful service)Provides a useful social service.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.
Sustains (change)Support and celebrate change that has already been won and needs to be sustained.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear short-term goal. Short-term goals tend to be things like: create or repeal a law; get a President impeached; make the city administration repair a sidewalk. A campaign with a short-term goal needs a clear theory of change, complete with targets that can be cajoled or pressured into effecting the goal.
Took Down A US Cop “Snitch” App
This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
BLM

Notes

It effectively disturbed the existing structure.