Korean pop music (K-pop) and its fandom are transnational and heavily reliant on social media affinity spaces to build community. Twitter is rife with conflict because of the competing interests of fandoms within the K-pop umbrella. The present study conducts an online ethnography of stan Twitter, especially ARMY—the fandom of BTS— with aims to see how fans use platform-specific features to index an identity in the larger K-pop fandom. Using the API as a resource, tweets were collected from the trending topic “BTS PAVED THE WAY” and from a separate but concurrent discourse space where orthographic variations and nicknames were used, called avoidance terms. The searches revealed evidence of language play that manipulates platform-specific Twitter features. Tweets in the trending topic have little word variation because users are exercising their perceived knowledge of Twitter’s algorithm to trend the phrase quickly. Stans use alternative spellings and mocking nicknames (avoidance terms) to escape a trending topic, creating a separate space in which they can conduct metapragmatic discourse. Different computer-mediated communication terms such as OT7 or multi index separate identities related to authenticity in the fandom spaces. Members of both fandoms weaponized their ideas on feminism as it relates to K-pop and their own lives in the arguments stemming from the trending of “BTS PAVED THE WAY.” Data from the tweets with avoidance terms shows how users employ African American English to index a ‘sassiness’ and derogatory anglicized Korean to target females in fandom. Observable changes in communication resulting from algorithmic, platform-specific, or fandom-specific modifications give us further insight into the style and pragmatics of computer-mediated communication.
