New Portal For Reporting Malicious Posts to Hybe/Big Hit

 Hybe announced today that there is a new portal for reporting things to their legal team. The link to this portal is protect.hybecorp.com. They are no longer using the protect@bighitmusic.co.kr email. Keep collecting all of your evidence the same way whenever you see malicious comments made against BTS members but use the new portal to report. I tried to update links in my posts with the new portal as well. Weverse notice on new report portal

Correcting Misinformation: Photos and Videos

     This past week we celebrated the 30th birthday of our Bangtan leader Kim Namjoon aka RM. It was nice to see the timeline full of support for him and seeing the feed full of positivity. There were touching tributes thanking him for saving ARMYs from difficult times, the usual thirst posts praising this handsome man (not complaining because Namjoon is gorgeous), lots of really cool fan art, and video clips remembering moments from the past. I think one of my favorite of those is the birthday when he was spinning around in the chair and he accidentally blew out the candles on his cake. He's so funny. He's my bias and I didn't think I could come up with anything to say on Threads so I just posted my birthday reel that I do for all of the guys' birthdays and I left him 2 short messages on Weverse wishing him a happy birthday. 

     Over all everything was cool until I started to notice several people using the wrong photos of him in their posts. They were using a picture of Lim Hyunshik from BTOB that they got from Pinterest or Facebook groups (BTS Facebook groups are notorious for spreading misinformation so if you are on there please be aware of this). It was annoying because how do you call yourself an ARMY, which to me is beyond just being a regular fan, and post how much you love a member of your ult group and post the wrong picture of them as a child in your birthday tribute?

      I politely informed a few of the posters that they had the wrong picture up and informed them of who they had posted incorrectly. The first person I informed deleted her post hours later and let me know she deleted it. That's how these things should go. I made a post on my Threads account asking ARMY not to use that picture and I posted the photo of Hyunshik with a side by side of him wearing the same thing as an adult as he recreated the picture of himself as a child. I thought that was common sense enough to show that it was not Namjoon. The second person I commented to didn't get it at first and proceeded to go back and forth with me over it. That's when I realized what a real problem this is.

      Because they got the picture from Pinterest, they thought that anything pulled up on Pinterest is somehow automatically legit. Pinterest is used by many as a search engine, is it not? Well the thing is, all of these search engines are run by AI and AI is trained using the information fed into it by humans. This happens whether you intentionally add to it or not. The internet uses all kinds of content to feed AI. This user on Threads showed me the screenshot where she had put "Namjoon baby pictures" (or something to that effect) into the search on Pinterest and the first pic that shows up is this one of Hyunsik. She was adamant that it was Namjoon because that is what she was shown. I asked her to search "Hyunsik of BTOB" and see if it comes up and sure enough the picture not only showed up but it showed up where other people had made posts saying "this is not Namjoon this is Hyunsik." That's when she got it and acknowledged that the picture was mislabeled when she found it. 

     When you tag a picture, caption it, or otherwise label it as someone or something that it is not, the searches are going to show it as that (if enough people do it). There are so many people who have wrongly listed this picture as Namjoon that when I reverse search it using Google Lens I have to scroll past at least 10 to 15 links from all across the internet until I get to one that mentions Hyunsik. That's pretty bad because all over YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, X/ Twitter and everywhere else this pic is being put out there as Namjoon and even the corrections are being ignored. I saw one where the person being corrected by a member of BTOB fandom says to them that Namjoon confirmed that it was him (giant eye roll). Why are people like this? You know if someone took the pic of Namjoon in the bumper car with his dad wearing coveralls or the one where he was rollerskating in the Mickey Mouse tee (his actual baby/child photos) and insisted over and over that it was say, a member of EXO, ARMY would flip out. Don't be that embarrassing ARMY that can't pick your ults out in a lineup. It's a bad look and spreading misinformation makes it harder for other newer ARMY to learn things and have the proper information. 

     There is another picture that goes around from time to time as Jungkook and that isn't him either. This picture is of Hongseok from Pentagon. Once again I called out the person posting this months ago on Threads and I told them this was not Jungkook. They proceeded to argue and when I asked for a source they gave Facebook which is not a valid source when people ask where you got something. Always provide a link. The official BTS Facebook is valid but a Facebook group or fan page is not. I told them they were wrong and provided a link I found to the photographer's X/ Twitter page where they still had this photo shoot listed proving this was Hongseok and not Jungkook. They argued that it was an edit. Why would anyone edit the pic? None of the arguments made sense and all were irrelevant once I showed proof. Blocked. Once again this is disrespectful to Jungkook and to Hongseok who deserves to be credited in his photos as himself. It's a beautiful photo shoot altogether and he's a beautiful man. He deserves to be credited properly. 

Hongseok of Pentagon 

     Mislabeling and wrongly crediting photos to an artist is one thing. Some people sharing them have no idea because others are lying to them about who these people are so they can get attention to their accounts from having "exclusive" photos no one else has (by labeling the wrong ones as BTS). Intentionally sharing photoshopped, AI generated photos is a whole other fight in dealing with misinformation. 

     The issue there is that people can't tell when a picture has been faked with AI or run through apps for AI or photoshopped. Some AI photos are blurry around the outline or the shadows are all wrong. The easiest giveaway for me is when the fingers are all messed up (multiple fingers or mangled or missing) and the writing is faked or not legible (sometimes AI fakes language by trying to sort of blend letters in multiple languages together and it creates an illegible mess). Then there are the real photos that people feed into apps like Rimini (I think that is the name) and they ruin perfectly good pictures of idols by adding crappy makeup or facial "flaw" editing to them. These are the pics usually that have Taehyung with double lids on both eyes and same with Namjoon when ARMY knows Tae and Jin both have one mono lid eye and one double lid eye and both of Namjoon's eyelids are mono lids. 

     Besides adding makeup and giving the guys unnecessary cosmetic changes, I have seen people splicing members of two different groups together to make a sort of hybrid. This is next level weird to me. I scroll the timeline and see a photo of a BTS member with features added from someone else from another group and ask how do people have time for this nonsense? A while ago there was a fake Jimin photo going around with him in military clothes sitting in a room. The background kind of looked like a hotel though which would be odd because he was deployed. Looking at the face though, I knew something was wrong with it. Jimin is hot and this version just looked weird and over done. I used Google Lens to reverse search the photo and I found out why. It was a photo of Kai from EXO that had his face mixed with Jimin and photoshopped. The stupid things people do on the internet for attention never cease to amaze and disgust me at the same time. I think the person posting that one blocked me for correcting them because they had tons of engagement from posting the picture and when faced with taking it down they decided to leave it up because most of the comments were praising Jimin. That's fine, I shared the original to show that it was faked. 

     There are also videos being spread that are not BTS and are being labeled or captioned as the members. There's one that started on TikToK as a joke saying the baby Jackie Chan was in a movie with looked like Tae. Some one started spreading it with the caption cut and said it was Tae. Nevermind that Tae was a teenager when the movie came out. Because Jackie Chan did the Simvest promos with Tae they took a movie clip and lied about it being him for likes. Just don't spread things without fact checking. If you ask for a source and the poster ignores you ask other ARMYs or look it up yourself.

     Have you ever used Google Lens? It can be a good app to use to get information whether you are looking for a item you saw somewhere and want to buy it, looking to find out if a photo is real or AI, or looking to see if a photo has been improperly tagged as someone else. Google Lens is available in the Google Playstore and Apple app store. Download the app and to reverse search a picture in the app you open the app and it takes you to your photo gallery. Click on the picture you want to search and Lens looks for it. It pulls up searches from across the internet where that photo was found. You may have to scroll a bit to find the proper information due to misinformation but do your research. Look for legit sites and check with knowledgeable ARMYs for confirmation or clarity. Lens doesn't always work though. Sometimes I get messages saying it's hard to identify people or a bunch of totally unrelated things. Most of the time, I get enough to work with to find out if something is real or not though. If you doubt that something is real (ex AI pics) or think it may be tagged as the wrong person but you can't confirm it, don't share it. It's that simple.

     There's always a reason why I try to correct misinformation. It's not to be mean or seem like I know everything because I will be the first to admit that I don't and I'm still learning every day. How are we going to have knowledgeable new ARMYs that enjoy the fandom if they keep getting fed lies and "jokes" that no one is in on except clout chasers? Correcting things now means not having to do it later. Correcting it now means not embarrassing the fandom when the boys come back with viral posts or pics that aren't them tagged/captioned as them. We can do better. 

How To Vote When Multiple BTS Members Are Nominated

  There has been some drama this week over voting and we need to address it and get this covered before we roll into end of the year voting. The issue of how we should collectively be voting when there are multiple BTS members nominated is what is causing arguments within ARMY. When you break it down it all comes down to math, basic math, nothing complicated. It’s not rocket science and I feel like constantly having the same conversation gets exhausting for those of us that get it. Name calling of OT7’s being called solos and antis because they disagree and can actually see the big picture will not be tolerated. Trust and believe you will be blocked and we will keep it moving. 

     When we are voting and multiple BTS members are nominated, the first day or so should be the day you vote for whomever you want. Rankings will be evident after the first day. I’m going to use the current September birthday voting on MNet as the example here because that’s what prompted this post though we have been going through this a lot, especially in chapter 2. Right now Jungkook and RM are both nominated as they both have September birthdays (Sept 1 and Sept 12 respectively). So Jungkook has been on top with Plave bouncing back and forth with him vying for the top spot. RM has been in 3rd place. Jungkook and Plave both have about 35% of the vote as of today (9/10) and RM has 7%. This is NOT rocket science. Hell, this isn’t even freshman algebra. Common sense says you vote for Jungkook if you expect BTS to win at all. I said what I said. As an RM bias, yes it does suck but that’s the way it is. Being OT7 means you do not always get to vote for your bias. Voting for RM means giving up votes that could go to JK while Plave will move forward off of those lost votes. RM has too much ground to make up to get from 7% to 35% + of the vote. He would need to have more than 35% to surpass both JK and Plave. To move from 3rd place to 1st takes more effort than moving from 2nd to 1st or maintaining 1st. 

     Properly addressing the elephant in the room would really take a whole other post and I really don’t have the words or time for all of it but, to touch on the issue a bit right now I will just say it. This fandom has too many diet solos who don’t get that having a bias does NOT mean you ignore other members for ANY reason. By diet solos, I mean people who consider themselves ARMY but don’t ride for all 7. I’m a Namjoon /RM bias. Do you have any idea how hard it is to see him constantly at the bottom of all these votings? All the shitty excuses I see people using for not wanting to stream for him but will call themselves ARMY? All the thirsty comments that we giggle and “teehhee” at but at the end of the day more than enough of the people making them are just attention seekers because if all of them streamed and voted he wouldn’t constantly be on the bottom. Have you noticed how we hardly ever struggle when a maknae or vocal line member is up for awards but when it’s hyung line we fight and it’s always the same ARMYs I see kicking ass to stream, vote, and otherwise support hyung line.. Those same ARMYs do the same for vocal line as well, consistently. These are the ones getting called solos for having more than an ounce of common sense. 

     Choeaedol did a September birthday vote at the beginning of the month. The same situation occurred  with RM and JK. RM finished 5th. Fifth! Jungkook lost to Plave, so he was second. Now theoretically since Jungkook’s birthday is gone, we should have been voting on MNet for RM because his birthday is after JK’s. I guess we aren’t as organized a fandom as we used to be or as logical thinking. I don’t know. Just my opinion. So here we are. On MNet for this vote you get 12 votes per day. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be winning this outright. Don’t split the vote.

    Why is this important? Because it goes beyond birthday votes and if we can’t get it together for a simple birthday vote ad on an app then what does that mean for end of the year voting. End of the year voting is important because this is where daesang awards (group of the year, artist of the year, etc) are won and lost. We have so much competition and with fandoms often teaming up against BTS to win, buying votes on Twitter, cheating with VPN’s, and playing manipulative psychological games like guilt tripping (cosplaying as ARMY multis and saying they choose another group to vote for because BTS has enough awards and to let someone else win) we don’t need to be divided over this. 

      Last year there was an end of the year vote on Choeaedool that was for best male artist (I believe that was the category-best male artist or best male vocalist).  V, Jungkook, and Jimin were all nominated. After the first day or 2 of voting, Jimin was in the lead out of BTS, Jungkook and Tae were further down. It was obvious that we needed to put our votes behind Jimin to win. Kang Daniel was the main rival for first place. We kept telling ARMYs to vote for Jimin and not to split the vote because all 3 will lose if the vote is split. Same situation where making up the ground between 4th or 5th place takes more work than going from 2nd to 1st or just maintaining 1st on a daily basis with consistent votes. We lost to Kang Daniel because people didn’t listen and continued to split the vote all the way down to the last day. Being stubborn and not listening to more knowledgeable ARMY does nothing to help BTS and that’s why we are all here. Not for our individual egos (I hope so because I’m here for BTS). It hurt to watch an end of the year award slip away like that.                       

     In conclusion, let’s use these smaller voting opportunities to practice voting and for those newer to voting to get used to it before the end of the year awards come up. Before I joined ARMY online, I didn’t know anything about voting for awards. In the US we only have MTV awards and Billboard that are voted on (besides Nickelodeon -do they still do that?). Everything else is decided by an exclusive panel of judges. You don’t know who they are unless they say they are on a panel. This is why Grammy's are so all over the place because the people who consume the music aren’t the ones making the decisions on who they think should win or and have no say in who is nominated. With K-Pop it’s different and voting to win awards is ARMYs love language with BTS to show them that we are here for them. With BTS enlisted and not returning to us as a full team till the end of June 2025, it’s highly important now that we show our support. Awards help us do that, even smaller ones.

Threads Is Not Twitter, Let's Keep It That Way

 TW: talking about things that have happened on Twitter so I feel like I may need a TW for self-harm, suicide, cyberbullying

 This week’s post is somewhat of an extension of last week’s post in that I want to discuss my thoughts on Twitter and Threads. They are two different apps and I feel like the influx of new users (and some older ones) on Threads don’t get that. I made a post on September 2nd in the morning reflecting my thoughts because I scrolled and saw three posts nearly in a row that would never have been there on ARMY Threads six months ago. Two were fan war starters and I was like, “nope, I'm definitely saying something,” so I did. The first comments were in agreement then came the noobs (new ARMY accounts that haven't been on the app longer than six months). Some of them seem to be the ones causing drama or excusing the drama. I was told I should go try Blue Sky if I wanted a “clean” app. I don't expect any social media to be “clean” whatever that means. I do expect ARMY to do better though, and if you call yourself ARMY you should want to do better. We don't do fan wars. Certainly not ones we start by saying “I hate (insert fandoms)” and proceed to post screenshots of hate tweets from X/Twitter or “proof” the fandom is trash based on one person acting maliciously. We keep it in the group chats and not out in the open instigating arguments. 

     Threads came to be a year ago in July 2023 in response to Twitter being taken over by Elon Musk who ran the platform downhill fast. The shit show that Twitter became under Musk is all his doing. I was on the app and I followed people who worked for Twitter/X that lost their jobs. They explained that things were going to get a lot worse before they ever got better. I watched as security that handled protecting people from abuse became pretty much non-existent. Then there were the glitches or so called glitches where users couldn’t post or could only like a set number of posts per day or over a 24 to 48 hour period and were restricted from then on. Rumor was that if you paid/subscribed to Twitter Blue (I think that was the name of it) then you could like more posts and comment more without restriction. So Musk decided to start trying to push users into payment plans/subscription tiers in order to have a better user experience on the app. I wasn’t paying for that. Not when an app that I used to enjoy decided that “free speech” (read: hate speech) was allowed unless it was directed towards Musk or anyone he defends.  So for a while I bounced back and forth between Twitter (which also went through a name change to X but no one calls it that) and Threads. 

     I learned the best things from Twitter ARMY and I also have seen the worst bullying that I have ever seen in my life happen on Twitter. The thing is all the crap is not worth wading through to get to the good part for me. I will never forget how kpoppies all came together in a mostly fake show of solidarity the day Moonbin passed away. I stayed out of the conversations surrounding mental health because to be honest, they were largely performative and it made me sick to my stomach to see some of these fandoms pretend to give a shit when they put people in the hospital or grave by bullying. Suddenly fandoms who photoshopped BTS members with self-harm marks, celebrated the death of cancer victims who were family members of ARMY or artists who worked with BTS, and mass shooting victims who were ARMY or friends of BTS, and doxxed others to put their info on porn sites gave a shit about mental health? Yeah spare me the fakeness. I would find out just how fake the "mental health matters" posts were less than 24 hours later.

     Another vile part of Twitter is all the solos, antis, shippers and all manner of weirdos who can’t bother to be normal fans of all the members of BTS. Solos are antis who hate all members except the one or two they stan. They are akgaes. They leave traps sometimes in order to start fights or they will go fishing for like minded solos to join their side of fandom, the dark pathetic side. Nothing wrong with having a bias because that’s not the same thing. You can be OT7 and have a bias like I do or just not have a bias at all. Solos openly express hate for all other members except their favorite. They stan the one member and not the group and will go as far as to exclude other members from their streaming and consuming of content.

     That being said, the day after Moonbin passed, I was on Twitter and some J-Hope anti made a post excluding J-Hope. I didn’t realize it was an anti account and don’t remember who they were a solo of. I didn’t realize it was a set up post either. It was set up to bait people like me who are OT7 into arguments. The screen name suggested they were a BTS fan because they used a member’s name and something else -maybe they had a little seven in the name too (a lot of us do including some fake ARMY). Seeing this post, I quote tweeted them and said something harmless like “Don’t forget Hobi.” Apparently that triggered an alarm for them to bring out the psycho bitches and out they came. I was getting comments like, “Go die,” “kill yourself.” and I was called stupid when I responded trying to figure out what all of this was about and I spelled a word wrong. I was so done with these losers. All this vitriol because they were downplaying a member of the group I thought we both were stans of. I realized after looking through their account that I had been played by antis. I took the bait and they came to chew me up and spit me out. I blocked the ones commenting but reported them first (of course nothing happened to their accounts because it’s Twitter, they don’t protect you from bullies anymore). Then, I ran a nuke block on everyone engaging with that post (nuke block was a site where you put in the URL of the tweet or link to it and it blocked everyone who liked it). I was so upset I took 48 hours or so off of Twitter. I logged out and stayed off. So much for everyone coming together the day before to advocate for mental health awareness and being kind to one another. Such bullshit. 

     I did some research when I got back online and the person running that account turned out to be a guy from India posing as a girl who pretends to like BTS. He has multiple accounts for rival fandoms who are always in ARMY business bullying ARMY. Makes sense. His IG account gave him away. I blocked him on all of my IG accounts and from that point further, I engaged less and less with anyone’s Twitter accounts. Not that I got that much engagement there anyway. It says something when you comment on a post or make a post and you get the notification that someone responded and you cringe a little because you automatically anticipate that it's some troll or some anti coming to your comments to be a jerk. You kind of develop a bit of anxiety about commenting or getting comments back. I don't know if anyone else gets that but I had that when I was on Facebook and on Twitter. This incident made it worse. I don't get that anxious feeling about my notifications on Threads though. 

     I had been on the app (Twitter) for 6-8 years I think and my personal account just became my stan account when I decided to join ARMY online. At first it was fun but it quickly became clique-ish. I noticed big accounts all talked to each other and people who talked a lot about voting and streaming got a lot of crap from solos. Playlist accounts even got bullied for posting playlists. Why? Because they were OT7 and solos didn't like that they spread focused playlists that included all 7 members as well as the focused releases. Meanwhile these solos were spreading looped playlists that sabotaged the streams and caused plays to be stripped on Spotify resulting in sabotaging the member's numbers they were trying to boost. Brainless behavior on full display there. 

     Over a year into learning Korean self-study I could tell that some of the translators were playing with words for engagement. I never said anything but waited till one got called out for lying. When I knew she lied about what was said I blocked her and others backing her up. A mistake is one thing but a full on mistranslation that a beginner/intermediate speaker picked up on–yeah get out of here with that. 

     As Musk’s antics got worse and worse, stupid things continued to happen to push my buttons and push me right out of that dumpster fire app. I got suspended for 24 hours for saying I hoped a guy’s Tesla would catch fire. There was a video going around of a guy chasing other cars on the road, cutting them off, and blocking them so they couldn’t go anywhere, and bashing their windows out. I wished for the downfall of a car and got suspended but people wishing death on others daily got no punishment. I started getting offensive ads that pushed fascist ideology (I’m in the US) and pushing Christian Nationalism. I tried to block ads which I could do, at first, and then I kept getting pop ups saying this was no longer allowed and I needed to subscribe to get rid of ads. Nope! Not paying to keep from seeing things that shouldn’t be there. So I deleted my account this past spring and never looked back.

     Let me reiterate that, I never looked back. I wish I had saved my bookmarks with receipts and links to some info but other than that I don’t miss the ever burning dumpster fire. At first I thought I would miss out on information about BTS, but I realize the best information will come from the official Big Hit Instagram and Weverse accounts. Yes the guys are still on Twitter and the account still posts but anything there will eventually be on their Instagram or Weverse. Even if it isn't, I have accounts I follow like @/dalbitbangtan and @/samaya_bangtan_girl on Threads who keep me updated on official news from BTS_TWT the official Twitter for the members. For me it wasn’t worth going through the hellscape to get information. I’d rather be a little later getting info than getting it ASAP and risking seeing something upsetting or being bullied on the way to getting info. Some people pop back and forth and that’s fine for them but it’s not going to work for me so I only have Threads and IG and I’m fine with only those as my socials. 

     Having Threads and having it be new at the time, I sought out other ARMYs and we came to the collective conclusion that we have a unique opportunity on Threads to redo what went wrong and continues to go wrong on Twitter. We want to create a space where ARMY of all walks of life feel safe and able to be themselves. No bullying and no spreading Twitter drama and fan wars in our spaces. No clout chasing with gossip from tabloids or unauthorized photos (real or faked with AI), no spreading rumors, and no age shaming. ARMY like BTS is also LGBTQIA+ inclusive so there’s obviously no discrimination allowed nor ableism. I also don’t believe in being a larger account than someone else and not responding to people. That’s so middle school. I experienced that a lot on Twitter where larger accounts wouldn’t even acknowledge that you said happy birthday to them with a like or comment back. You could ask a genuine question and no one would answer you. Sometimes other small accounts would answer, hours or days later. I try to help everyone and engage with everyone who engages kindly with me regardless of how many followers we have. 

     There are a lot of ARMY just coming over to Threads and we welcome you. Those that are relatively new may not be following anyone who was there when we first decided to make Threads an ARMY safe space and may not know but I’m saying it and have been saying it. We need to get it together because there are people trying every single day to tear ARMY apart and not to get into that, but we need to decide how we plan to move forward as a fandom. Some things need to be put aside and others just need to be handled better.

     One thing I really want to address here is anger and spreading hate and negativity that comes from Twitter. I left Twitter because of all of the hate being spread by antis. Why are there people bringing it from Twitter over to Threads? I don’t need to see screenshots of what some anti account says about BTS while I am scrolling Threads. There is no point in posting a Twitter screenshot and clapping back at the hater in the post on Threads. They can’t see it unless they are on Threads and in that case you should find them and tag them because we do not care. Anyone that wants to see that kind of rubbish can go to Twitter to see it. Why not clap back to them right under their post on Twitter? Oh because you don’t want drama? Well don’t bring it onto Threads because we don’t want it either. Don’t start fan wars on Threads because we don’t do that there. You aren’t adding anything valuable to the community by sharing drama. I am blocking the accounts that do this because I left Twitter for a reason. I’m not trying to see people make Threads into Twitter 2.0. We can choose the kind of content we want to see and participate in and boost that. 

     So if you see anything on Twitter and it upsets you because haters are in ARMY’s business, instead of spreading that, you can send it to the Big Hit legal team (via their website ) and block and report the account/post. You don’t need to run to Threads with it. You could leave something positive on either or both platforms to combat the negative. If you need to talk about it keep it to your DMs or group chats because sharing it spreads it. You are spreading negativity. Haters will always hate and there really is nothing we can do about it but try to get as many of them sued as possible. When it hits them where it hurts they will probably tone it down but sharing it and complaining won’t do anything but upset people who didn't know before you brought it to their timeline now more people are upset and ranting. 

     I don’t say any of this to try to be bossy or control what people post because ultimately they are going to be posting whatever they want to their pages but in case people wonder why they get less engagement or aren’t getting more followers I will be blocking negative posts from Twitter that aim to start drama rather than to inform. I hope other ARMYs will do the same. I know there are some that like gossip and rumors and even some that like fan wars. I don’t and I don’t want to see it. The difference in energy on the timeline when it's release day or during a release week vs when a bunch of drama is being spread and everyone is chiming in their opinion on something some loser on Twitter said about the guys is so different. Basically if it isn't an update from the official Big Hit Twitter or the guys Twitter, a fact checked update from a chart account about a milestone, something fact checked from a fan base that's not a stalker post or something otherwise informative that's not shade throwing or negative then keep it on Twitter and not on Threads. 

      Leaving Threads for another platform isn’t it for me right now. Eventually all of the trouble makers will make additional accounts on the other apps too and none of them will be any better than the others. At this point all we can do is acknowledge the spread of negativity and misinformation and try to do better at keeping it out of our spaces.

Update: 12.10.24 I joined Bluesky but I also keep Threads. What led to me joining Bluesky was the influx of negative accounts joining Threads and Meta/Threads lack of moderation to protect people from bullying and misinformation. The downfall of Twitter and mass exodus to Bluesky has led to many good informative ARMY accounts going to Bluesky and I found accounts I used to follow there that aren't on Threads. Bluesky does have better moderation in the form of filters and blocklists. Staying on both apps for now.

Threads Tips and Information

      Over the past few weeks we have been going through a lot and there has been an influx of new users to the site. With this influx a lot of us are getting new ARMY followers (who are always welcome) and we should help them understand the kind of ARMY culture we are trying to build on Threads. A lot of us left Twitter or never had it so we don’t pop back and forth between Twitter/X and Threads. I’ve seen a lot of posts recently, over the past week in particular that seem like people don’t really understand that Threads is Meta which is with Facebook and IG and so it does not work the same way as Twitter. The basic parts are the same but there are differences that you may take advantage of on Twitter/X that do not exist or don’t work the same way on Threads so using the same methods as Twitter are a waste of time on Threads. I thought I’d put together a tips and tricks and info post for new users and even users that are not as new that may benefit from the info.

Curate your timeline

     On any social media platform the first thing you want to do is make sure you are getting to see what you want to see in your feed and not a lot of what you don’t. The Threads algorithm is pretty easy to train to show you what you want to see. I have played with it a lot and it’s pretty simple I guess. If you want to see more BTS in your feed the little posts people do “dear algorithm or dear threads–show me blah blah blah” don’t work. They’re fun because it shows people your interests but you haven’t actually told the algorithm what you want to see, you told users. So in order to see what you want to see you have to interact with what you want to see. This works and sometimes it can be a negative so you have to use your engagement carefully. By engagement I mean likes, comments, follows. 

    I am BTS ARMY. I like a few other groups like TXT and Le Sserafim, and P1Harmony. When other groups I don’t like show on my feed I swipe left to show I’m not interested or I will click the 3 dots on the top (or bottom depending on the updates) of a post and click not interested. That tells the algorithm not to show me that because I am not into it. I still may see things from the other groups but this makes it a little less likely. 

     If you do like something you should give it a like or comment or both. If you are seeing no BTS on your feed and you want to see more, type “BTS”  into the search bar and go through the posts and like the ones that go with what you want to see more of on your feed. Like a lot of them to train the algorithm. Leave a few comments as well. It could be nothing more than a purple heart on a post. That shows you are engaging with content and the system picks up on that. Of course people may follow you after you like their posts. That’s normal. Don’t feel obligated to follow back everyone who follows you either. Just check their accounts and if you want to, follow back, if not then don’t worry about it. It’s never required.

     When you see something you don’t like you should block or mute or keep scrolling past it because if you comment that counts as engagement. Negative comments still count toward the algorithm so you are going to still get posts in your feed on that topic that may be negative. You are also inadvertently spreading the content to others on your timeline by interacting with it. More on that later.     

     You can use muted words feature to further curate your timeline. You can go to “settings” and “privacy” and go to “hidden words” and choose words you want to mute. I put groups I don’t want to see, fandom names,  topics, commonly overused phrases (seeing people mute phrases like ‘unpopular opinion’ and ‘can we normalize’ because they’re getting annoying), and anything else I can think of. It doesn’t work on photos if the caption doesn’t have these words in them or videos but it does help clear out what you don’t want to see. If someone comments on a post or shares a post with one of those words or if it is trending it will show blocked out to you as “content not available” or it may show as “some comments have been hidden” on a post.

If you make a post and someone leaves a comment that you don't want to deal with you can hide that comment from the feed. Just click on the three dots where you'd report a comment and click "hide from everyone" and that comment won't show with the other comments. They won't get any engagement on their comment. If you want to go a step further, hide then block so no one sees it in your comment section and the commenter gets blocked so they can't come back and say anything else. This is what I call protecting your peace on the app. Let the trolls talk to the wall.

     

Reporting

     Reporting posts on Threads works through Instagram (IG). You report a post on Threads and you get the result of the report on your IG notifications. I find that they use AI to determine if something violates their terms and conditions and often it is way off the mark. I have reported horrible things like sexist bullying and racist bullying only to have Threads say it doesn’t violate terms and conditions and to just block the person. People will post things in code now (spelling things with symbols or misspelling intentionally to avoid detection) so a lot slips by the AI they use. You can always report anything you see that is not appropriate like bullying, people sharing unauthorized photos including AI edits, misinformation etc but IG/Threads doesn’t often take action because the system doesn’t see it as a problem. Some things are best sent to Hybe/Big Hit Legal through their portal. The legal team at Big Hit Hybe will collect evidence to pursue individuals in court. Every few months we get notifications from Weverse updating us on legal actions being taken and though they don’t often name the people being sued we know based on the details of the case what we have sent to them and that our evidence from social media is going towards pursuing these offenders.

     If you report something on Threads or IG and it is sent back saying it doesn’t violate terms and conditions, you can click the button to have them review it again. If it is something I feel they are totally missing and should be removed ASAP I will keep clicking the button to appeal. On the last option to appeal they will ask if you want to send it to the Oversight Board. There’s a questionnaire you have to fill out for this one and it can take a few minutes. I reserve those for flat out bullying and malicious content that is harmful so more so bullying of people who have seen or will see the content as opposed to BTS who is not on the app. If someone is bullying ARMY and I see it and report it and IG/Threads does nothing then I will send those all the way up and see how far they go. 

Blocking

     I know there are ARMY that don’t like blocking people. I don’t know why because it’s not like the app tells the person you blocked them. As far as I know there aren’t any API apps for Threads yet like there were for Twitter that let you know so you could block back so it’s still very anonymous unless you go through your following  person by person to see who blocked you. It’s very tedious to do so I doubt people will sit there and do it depending on how many people they are following . You should feel free to block people if you don’t want to see what they post. Blocking is self-care to me. If I can protect my peace by blocking then I do so quite often. The difference between muting and blocking is that if you mute them you just don’t see their posts unless you go to their page or unless someone shares it. Blocking you don’t see their posts and they don’t see yours. Muted they can still see and like your posts. They can comment too but comments get hidden. 

     Blocking keeps them off of other people’s timelines too. The Yoongi police line photos are still being shared almost daily. Some by new accounts looking for engagement. I have seen a lot of people saying their timelines are curated so they aren’t seeing it. There are several good reasons for this. Blocking keeps things from being shared so the blocklists going around are doing their jobs. People commenting asking those sharing the photos to remove them are unintentionally sharing them as well because when you comment on a post your reply and the post you are commenting on both get shared to your feed. If they block instead, you see nothing. People with more followers are more likely to see these things because they have more people in their circles who could reply to something or share it. There’s no algorithm penalty for how many people you block or anything silly like that either like you get seen less if you block more. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it did I would rather have my circle of positive well meaning ARMY than all the drama seeking ones coming from X now and starting issues we don’t need on Threads.

Trending Phrases and Hashtags

     One Twitter thing that people are trying to make happen on Threads is trending terms and hashtag trends. Sorry to break it to you but as of right now trending particular phrases as is done on Twitter with blocks of text (ex : Yoongi superstar, Yoongi little meow meow, ARMY stands with Yoongi, Yoongi is the king and boss) typed over and over and being asked to comment or reply with the same--that doesn’t work on Threads and can get your account suspended. The AI that does security against spam can pick that up and read it as repetitive bot behavior so I don’t recommend doing this at all on Threads. I had my account on Threads suspended for 7 days for commenting “thank you” to people who wished me happy birthday. It has happened to several people and they suspended one woman’s main account for a month for the same. 

     Trending topics is not even something all Threads users have yet. To see what’s trending go to your search page on Threads. The trending topics are right beneath this search bar if you have them and there’s usually no more than 5. It’s hard to try to trend when only 5 things are going to show as opposed to the whole list of like 20+ I guess that Twitter has and they have their trending broken into categories as well. If I’m not mistaken I think the trending on Threads is set to regional so you usually see what’s popular in your area and that makes it harder to trend fandom type of things.

     Only one hashtag on Threads counts as an actual hashtag. If you use the symbol or the hashtag button then your tag turns into a blue hyperlink that is clickable and will send the person who clicked on it to a list of other posts with the same words tagged or words in it in general. The posts with a ton of hashtags won’t really trend as hashtags. The keywords may still show in trends if enough people use them in a post. So strangely enough if you type a word in a post and enough people to make it trend do the same (no one knows the number needed on Threads and trends don’t show numbers here) then it may still trend. Adding a hashtag to the front of a word and packing a ton of them into a post does nothing. You’d probably be better off just listing the words as keywords separated by a comma. It’s strange I know but that’s how it works. Looking at the top 5 I have trending right now as I type this there are posts included that don’t have a single hashtag but do have the words or phrases. It’s probably a better precaution not to add a ton of words with the hashtag symbol too and just add the words separated by commas if you want to trend them because the AI security thing may flag your posts as spam based on tons of hashtag symbols. Better safe than sorry.

Private accounts

     Private accounts are such a pet peeve on Threads. As an introvert I understand some people may want to keep their accounts private or be lurkers and just see what other people are talking about without participating. I get it but here’s the thing on Threads (which I think is so stupid but they didn’t ask users for their opinion) – if you have a private account on Threads, and you comment on a post NO ONE CAN SEE IT. Your private account status makes your comments private so only people you follow who follow you back can see your comments. If you follow me and your account is private I will not follow you back just to see if you pass the vibe check and then I can see your comments. Why would I do that when you can already see what I’m about? If I don’t like your content then I will have to go back and unfollow you anyway and it’s a waste of time for me.  I will just remove you as a follower and maybe block you because it says in my bio not to follow me which means you didn’t bother to check my bio before following me. 

     I know IG ties Threads to your account so if you don’t want a Threads tied to your personal account set up another IG to use Threads. That way you can go off private. If my page is open and we’re all about communicating on Threads and actually engaging with each other’s accounts then we should be doing that and private accounts are the opposite of that. 

Impersonator accounts

     No members of BTS nor Hybe official nor Big Hit official are on Threads. There are several accounts that use the members names in their display name and use versions of Big Hit Ent or Big Hit Entertainment or Hybe Official and official is often spelled incorrectly. As of right now, there are NO official accounts on Threads for BTS. The use of the members' names is not necessarily a problem but if you see accounts using their names and pictures and talking back to the followers in first person (ex; ‘Hi I’m Jimin of BTS and I miss my ARMY’ ) report and block that page immediately. Don’t even engage because that spreads it. There are strange people who are either super gullible or they enjoy cosplaying with these fake accounts. They ignore us when we alert them to the fact that these pages are fake because they like the idea that they are actually talking to the guys. Well what these accounts will do is get the users to believe they are legit and after a while they will start to spread malicious rumors or they will start DM-ing users and asking for money. The people who fall for this after they have been warned are beyond help at that point. The make up lies like they lost their Black Card and start on the usual money scams. It has happened to several people on Twitter already. I have seen some accounts start to try to get sympathy by saying the guys are having a hard time in the military and are scared. So stupid. They put this fear into the fans then start begging for cash or gift cards (where they are spending gift cards while enlisted I don’t know but gift cards would be the first red flag to run the other way). They also always speak English which should be another red flag. Just stay away from all of these fake accounts. Blue checks mean nothing as they can be bought on all social media platforms now by subscribing. If they do join Threads then the official Big Hit Instagram (IG) will let us know. 

     There are other things I want to address about Threads and how we want to keep things peaceful as it used to be a few months ago but I will leave that for another post. I don’t want to make this one too lengthy. Hope the tips help you enjoy the app more and help us keep the community more drama free.