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AN UNEXPECTED form of protest has exploded across social media. Fans of Korean pop music, K-pop, have been adding their voices to the Black Lives Matter protests by 鈥渙ccupying鈥� digital spaces with a flood of adorable music videos. Already, they have disrupted police surveillance, US president Donald Trump鈥檚 re-election bid and a meeting of white supremacists on Twitter.

It all started when the large and enthusiastic community of K-pop fans in the US heard that police in Dallas, Texas, were asking concerned citizens to send in videos of 鈥渋llegal activity from the protests鈥�. Sick of police targeting peaceful protesters, fans spread the word among their ranks that everyone should . It worked. Soon, the police were watching clips from bands like BTS and gifs from the game Animal Crossing. Eventually, the reporting system crashed.

Thrilled with their efforts, fans used similar tactics with a white supremacist hashtag on Twitter. Many groups form ad hoc 鈥減ublic squares鈥� on Twitter by using hashtags, like #blacklivesmatter, to organise and share information. The fans鈥� goal was to take over a white supremacist hashtag by posting nothing but K-pop content to hinder racists from speaking with each other. Within hours, they had tweeted so much that the hashtag became completely useless 鈥� unless your jam is fighting about the merits of different BTS songs.

As their coup de gr芒ce, the fans targeted Trump鈥檚 re-election campaign, snapping up free tickets to his Oklahoma rally. They claimed to have reserved nearly a million, leading the Trump campaign to build an extra stage and proclaim there would be overflow seating only. Just 7000 or so people showed up.

鈥淚n the world of hashtags, it鈥檚 hard to separate grassroots actions from state-sponsored interference鈥�

It is interesting to compare these protests with a related form of hashtag skullduggery that took place during the Washington DC protests after George Floyd鈥檚 death at the hands of police. In the early morning on 1 June, several newly created Twitter accounts used the hashtag #dcblackout to spread the rumour that the government had ordered a blackout of the city overnight, shutting down phones and internet access to stop . Even though many people were reporting live from their phones during the supposed blackout, the rumour popped on Twitter and beyond. Half-a-million accounts retweeted the hashtag in just 9 hours.

And then the rabbit hole went deeper. A second wave of rumours began to spread on the hashtag, coming from hacked accounts and bots. Suspiciously, all these tweets used the exact same wording to deny the blackout had happened. The #dcblackout tweets and counter-tweets seemed perfectly designed to inspire conspiracy theories, which they have 鈥� even after countless sources, from electrical grid experts to eyewitnesses, demonstrated that the blackout hadn鈥檛 occurred.

Harvard University鈥檚 Joan Donovan said that the #dcblackout cycle of hashtag manipulation felt like carefully targeted propaganda, intended to foster confusion and fear. Perhaps it came from foreign actors, or some group closer to home. Either way, the result distracted from the real issues underlying the protests. Unlike the K-pop hashtag protests, which were chaotic and spontaneous, the #dcblackout tweets felt as crafted as a Thomas Pynchon novel.

In the world of hashtags, it鈥檚 hard to separate grassroots actions from state-sponsored interference. In fact, some of the first accounts to spread the #dcblackout rumour were ones that normally spout K-pop news. These days, media literacy requires us to spend lots of time rescuing legitimate information from an endless avalanche of randomness. The greatest propaganda weapon in the social media age might be noise.