“What an awful thing to wake up this morning and one of the first things you see is #RIPMileyCyrus!” tweeted Perez Hilton. Increasingly, however, hashtags are being used by groups of fans – “fandoms” – not to promote stars, but as weapons in the murky world of online wars. K-pop fan Ram, whose tweets trying to explain the whole sorry situation were retweeted nearly 700 times, thinks these new, more chaotic fan wars are a demonstration of loyalty. Photograph: PictureGroup/Rex FeaturesAnother soldier of the short-lived #RIPMileyCyrus Twitter war was Jorge Flores, a K-pop fan from Baytown, Texas. “Pop fans have never been thirstier to police and label someone problematic or petty or shady, because above all else, it provides them with some added entertainment,” Stern says.

Source: The Guardian August 18, 2016 17:26 UTC