[boredpudding]

No need to call them mentally ill. It's fun to create a large amount of attention to the thing you're a fan of.

I'm from a smaller country and around 2010-2012 smaller bands did this as well. It was hilariously easy to create a 'trending topic' in a country back then, so it happened quite a lot.

It's just fun to create attention for the thing you love. The same way people on Hacker News like to share certain (open source) projects and upvote it.

[mattigames]

They are not doing it because they came out with the idea to help their little town band, they were told to do it by the giant corporations behind those bands, BTS and BLACKPINK being perhaps the two most insidious in this regard, it's literally an unpaid job and those companies aim for the teenage girls and boys who who are the most unhealthily obsessed with one or more members of the band to do it, by telling these thousands of impressionable teens that the way to show that love is to become the equivalent of human spam bots.