K-Pop Fans Spam Police Department App With Fancams to Interfere With Protest Surveillance
K-pop fans literally spammed a police department app with videos and memes to support protesters in the wake of George Floyd's police brutality murder.
It all started when the Dallas Police Department announced that people could submit tips — a.k.a video or photo evidence of "illegal activity" — from the Black Lives Matter protests through an app called iWatch Dallas.
"If you have a video of illegal activity from the protests and are trying to share it with @DallasPD, you can download it to our iWatch Dallas app," they wrote. "You can remain anonymous."
Instead, fans flooded the app with fancam videos, which are clips that focus on a single member of a K-pop band, usually while the group is dancing/performing. (This regularly happens on Twitter when fans post footage of their favorite artists even in response to completely unrelated tweets.)
The intent was to bury any information about individual protestors with unrelated videos — and it appears have worked, too.
Within hours of the original tweet, Dallas PD announced the iWatch Dallas app was temporarily down, citing "technical difficulties."