While the BTS win for Top Social Artist category in the recently held Billboard Music Awards marked a milestone for the K-pop industry as a whole, not everybody is celebrating their victory. In fact, Twitter was flooded with negative reactions from netizens who claimed that they do not know who the Bangtan Boys are.
According to All Kpop, BTS fans were offended by the level of hate that some of the netizens were spewing, throwing shade at their race merely because they were Asian. "Who are these Asians?" one netizen asked, while another even criticized the BTS fandom for devoting so much time to voting for the K-pop group.
Some of the hate posts even used foul language and racist statements. There were also those who expressed surprise that the people in the audience were cheering wildly as BTS was announced the winner of the category.
Most of the haters could not accept that BTS was able to win over more internationally known superstars like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande and Shawn Mendes who were nominated in the same category. However, the sentiments of the bashers seemed not to be reflected among the artists present in the award ceremony who gave BTS the credit that their achievement deserved. Even Miley Cyrus was spotted clapping and beaming as the boys took the stage to accept their award.
However, even before the award ceremony, there was already a strong indicator of a BTS win as ARMY, the official BTS fandom posted a record number of 20 million votes in a span of 18 hours on the first day of voting alone. Beliebers also managed to trend Justin Bieber's hashtag but generated only some 400,000 tweets on the first day. Despite causing some of the BBMA servers to crash because of the voting volume, ARMY continued to vote for BTS throughout the voting period. BTS also continued to maintain their strong position on the Billboard Top 50 chart since they started charting in October 2016, Kpopstarz reported.
While there were many haters, the BTS win in the Billboard Music was still well received by K-pop fans and artists as congratulatory messages also flooded the internet. Among those who posted their good wishes were K-pop idols Alexander of U-KISS and Peniel of BTOB who congratulated BTS for representing Asia well and shining the spotlight on K-pop on a world stage.
