Stan Twitter Is Taking Over the Internet
It’s also a huge force for social change.
“If you’ve never been on [it], or seen it, or interacted with it: culture shock. It’s gonna get you… It’s like a fever dream,” states YouTube creator Jasmine Zade in one of her videos.
She’s talking about the infamous and peculiar corner of the internet known as “stan Twitter.” According to Urban Dictionary, stan Twitter is “a section of Twitter that is comprised of cult-like-fandoms that worship popular artists or artist groups. [It] consists of fans engaging socially to online individuals, discussing topics relating to their faves, fan girling/boying over updates on their faves, and a competitve battle ground amongst the different fandoms.” In other words, stan Twitter is a community that revolves around “stanning” (obsessing) around different celebrities, and it even has its own culture and lingo. Some of the most enthusiastic stanning fandoms are those around Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, and the K-pop group BTS.
In the past, stan Twitter has been largely self-contained. While different fandoms have interacted with each other, it seems they have been kind of cut off from the rest of Twitter, and the internet as a whole.
However, it seems that that might now be changing. Recently, stan Twitter came out of their own bubble and mobilized to get hashtags such as #tomhollandisoverparty, #shawnmendesisoverparty, #noahschnappisoverparty trending. This act of “canceling,” now taking the form of #___isoverparty is used when someone has done something wrong and the internet calls them out on that. But in this case, these celebrities hadn’t actually been canceled. They were instead a form of “clickbait,” and were filled with fancams (video edits) of various celebrities. The stans had taken over.
While stan Twitter had before largely been considered just a weird, niche corner of the internet, after a few incidents like these, now both the stans themselves as well as the rest of the online world began to realize their power.
And, due to recent killing of George Floyd and the resulting social movement for racial equality that has spread across the US, it has even been used for good.
Recently, the Dallas Police Department tweeted a call to download footage of protestors to an app called iWatch:
Knowing that this footage could be used against the protestors and even cause them to be arrested later on, K-pop stans began to take action. They flooded the app with fancams of their favorites, temporarily shutting it down. A few days later, when people started posting under the hashtags #WhiteOutWednesday and #WhiteLivesMatter with racist content as an attempt to counter the #BlackLivesMatter movement, K-pop fans again fought back, overwhelming the hashtags with K-pop videos.
Additionally, in recent days, another person has become a popular figure within stan TikTok. Only this time, it’s not a musician, or actor, or even one person at all. It’s the hacktivist group Anonymous.
When Anonymous returned amidst the George Floyd protests, people started to cheer them on — and now there is an entire fandom around them, fancams included:
Now this isn’t the first time that an unlikely figure has been stanned, especially as the stan community has moved to TikTok. Past targets include Vector and Gru from Despicable Me, Michael Scott from The Office, and even Kim Jong Un.
Now, even random protestors are being stanned:
More recently, K-pop stans have been flooding QAnon (the far-right conspiracy theory) hashtags with fancams in order to stop misinformation from spreading.
Ultimately, stan Twitter may seem like just another peculiar part of the internet, with their own customs and language, that has somehow seemed to cross over into dominant internet culture. They can make memes and fancams out of anyone and anything. But when push comes to shove, they can mobilize as a shockingly large and influential force capable of creating social change.
