Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community

Abstract

This article is a critical examination of the social media platform Weverse and its associated e-commerce platform Weverse Shop, platforms developed and operated by the Korean entertainment conglomerate Hybe Corporation. Hybe, perhaps best known for being the corporation that manages the K-pop group BTS, uses Weverse to promote and control economic and affective bonds between popular performers and audiences. This article argues that Weverse represents a type of platform that negotiates other models emerging from American and Chinese contexts, advancing Korean corporate interests through the harnessing of integrated fan activities. The use of platform technologies to administer the relations between commodified musical products, stars, and fans represents the emergence of what we term platform fandom. Platform fandom, we argue, is a corporatized technical relation designed to foster affective attachments between fans and stars, negotiating global audiences in which fan communities lose geographic specificity and, consequently, an ability to cohere through the negotiation of inclusion and exclusion of members. This article uses Weverse as a case to examine the intersection of globalized cultural production and entertainment, problems of global fandoms, and the use of social media platforms to manage and mitigate against the seeming risks fans provide for both corporate idols and corporate investments in cultural products.

Created by the Hybe Corporation—a South Korean ¹ company central to the global popularity of K-pop—Weverse is a social platform developed to foster and manage relations between musicians and fans. Weverse describes itself as “Official for All Fans” and a “Global fandom platform for the fans and artists around the world” (Weverse, 2024). Weverse is linked with an additional e-commerce platform developed by Hybe, the Weverse Shop, which describes itself as “All Things for Fans” (Weverse Shop, 2024). These platforms derive from the industrial needs of contemporary global entertainment, where K-pop fandom has been framed as a “fan-centered . . . idol production system” that acknowledges the necessity of fans in the popularity (or lack thereof) of pop music (J. O. Kim, 2021, p. 9).

Fandom once was imagined as an unruly space in which audiences—while necessary for the success of media industries—were inherently resistant to control by industry (i.e., Fiske, 1987). However, in recent years, scholarship on fans has had to rethink this argument. Rather than fan communities “resisting” corporate interests, scholars instead address how fans create internal hierarchies and divisions, often linked with the gendering of fan activities (Busse, 2013). Fandoms are noted for their reactionary politics (Stanfill, 2020), and “toxic” fandoms are organized around policing the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (Hills, 2018). In the case of Weverse, platforms represent an attempt to manage fan agency through technological control, perpetuating a form of what Mel Stanfill (2019) terms the “domestication of fans.” Industry’s “invitations to fans seek to make them both more useful and more controllable, thus making fans a resource to exploit” (p. 11), argues Stanfill, incorporating fans into the generation of emotional and monetary value. Given legal struggles over intellectual property, this domestication is not without its benefits. In embracing corporate management, domestication protects fans, by both insulating them from lawsuits and publicly acknowledging their significance in circuits of cultural production.

Weverse and the Weverse Shop employ the affordances of social platforms to enact this domestication. They provide a model for cultural industries where platform media can be used to exert control over a market, extending it globally, and managing many—and potentially all—of the economic and social activities associated with this market. Weverse relies on numerous multimedia functions associated with popular music fandom—chat services, live-streaming, and merch sales—while also brokering relations between advertisers and audiences. As well, breaking the app into Weverse and the Weverse Shop presents the illusion that Weverse keeps financial and social networking functions separate, even though these functions are, in any meaningful sense, deeply integrated. As the app seeks to manage relations between musicians and fans, the boundaries enacted by the app are notable given the rise of toxic fandoms and the possibility of racist, hostile, or otherwise antagonistic behaviors of fans as markets and audiences for K-pop expand globally and rely on multilingual fan bases.

We term this use of social media to domesticate fans platform fandom. Platform fandom works to harness, undermine, or even negate fan agency. It relies on the material force of social media, which we understand as a set of technical infrastructures designed to manage the interaction of audiences and their objects of attention. Yet, platform fandom requires both an acknowledgment of fans’ agency and attention to how platforms dictate interaction through design. ² The platform acts as an intermediary that can link—or separate—fans from each other and fans from performers. While many understandings of platforms describe their force in articulating specific parties together (Srnicek, 2016), our interest is in how platforms provide a method for restricting the possible relations between people, harnessing attachments in ways that become “productive” for global media industries.

We conclude that the success of an app like Weverse depends on its ability to render fandom an individualized, atomized activity, in opposition to previous imaginings of fandom as a community based around collective taste. Crucially, the evidence that we draw on does not suggest that Weverse actually does this, merely that its design is intended to do this. Without fully bracketing the actual activities of fans on Weverse, our focus here is on the broader context of a platform in which K-pop fans are imagined as a resource to be managed for corporate ends. Weverse, we argue, provides an ideological and technical model that negotiates social and economic dimensions of global cultural production that demonstrates how platforms can be designed to organize fans.

In addition, and in relation to the emphasis of this special issue, we also want to foreground how Weverse represents a kind of global platform emerging from Asian economies intended to court international, and especially American, audiences. Much work on global platforms, especially on platforms in India and China, seeks to “provincialize” the centrality of the United States in theorizing or narrating the emergence of platform capitalism (Jia et al., 2022), instead foregrounding heterogeneity and specificity even within national contexts (i.e., Zhang & Chen, 2022). Our arguments here follow this model, but also suggest that, within the Korean context, the affordances of platform media are harnessed to globalize Korean popular culture and foster a global audience for Korean cultural exports.

Thus, the global dimensions of Weverse are unusual, at least when framed within discussions of Asian platforms, given how it requires an intersection of national and global economic and cultural contexts. The singularity of Weverse—designed to connect global audiences with mostly Korean-based pop stars and musicians that hold contracts with Korean entertainment corporations—means that it must negotiate global audiences and legal jurisdictions while always centering the needs of Korean cultural industries. While there are other precedents and alternatives to Weverse within the Korean media landscape that also use K-pop to cater to a global audience—most notably, Dear U Bubble, an app created by Korean media conglomerate SM Entertainment that permits fans to send messages directly to artists—Weverse has specific differences from these alternatives we will detail throughout this article. Much has been made about how K-pop and the Korean Wave (or Hallyu) represent a reshaping of global cultural hegemony in which the United States is not the locus of global cultural production (cf. Jin, 2016; Lie, 2015). What we describe demonstrates how the platform structure embedded into Weverse is linked to the hegemonic negotiations of what has been termed Hallyu 2.0, the Korean Wave associated with K-pop, social media, and global fandom (see Lee & Nornes, 2015). We will first describe the relationship between nation and platform derived from recent work on the political economy of platforms, before turning toward a discussion of the history of the Hybe Corporation and its creation of Weverse. We will then go into detail about the technical design of Weverse as an app before concluding with comments on how Weverse and Hybe’s plans for global expansion reinvent the political and social possibilities for fandom more broadly.

The first part of this article employs a critical political economy approach that emphasizes business strategy, ownership, and the concentration and conglomeration of media corporations. We draw on a range of journalistic sources (both popular and specialist), as well as the financial documents of publicly traded corporations, to examine Hybe’s development of Weverse as well as the broader global contexts within which Weverse is positioned. ³ The second part turns to a specific focus on Weverse and the Weverse Shop, drawing on the “Walkthrough Method” for studying apps (Duguay & Gold-Apel, 2023; Light et al., 2018). Our primary emphasis in the second part is to examine how the affordances built into Weverse and the Weverse Shop are intended to manifest the corporate goals of Hybe. However, we also examine some of the ways users engage with the app, and how this presents a point of instability—while Weverse is obviously intended to domesticate its users and fans, it is unclear if it actually does this, or if fans simply do not use the app to communicate with other fans. ⁴ We now turn to discuss the national and international contexts of media platforms and apps today.

National Capitalisms and Platform Economies

While platforms are often approached at the level of the corporation, Steinberg et al. (2025) have argued that a pluralist approach to platform capitalism should foreground how national policies shape capitalism within a specific geographical region. An analysis of platforms should attend to how cultural production incorporates at least three different levels: individuals, such as the users of platforms and those whose labor is bought and sold via platform markets; corporations, which develop and operate platforms, extracting value from the brokering of relations between individuals; and the state, which can ban or regulate the operation of specific platforms, encouraging, enabling, or prohibiting vertical or horizontal integrations of a corporation.

Yet, when the state and national capitalisms are addressed in academic analyses of platforms, there often tend to be quick reductions in identifying the relation between nation and platform, foregrounding how the largest, most globally dominant platforms come from either the United States or China. When differentiating between these two national contexts, an easy distinction is often made—a distinction that identifies the general forms many platforms take, but may too easily overshadow the multiplicity of platform structures that exist beyond the largest and most popular examples.

US-based platforms, like those represented by corporations like Meta or Google and their platforms Instagram and YouTube, are API-based brokers of data extraction, in which varied technologies reinvent daily life through surveillance. These platforms serve as intermediaries between advertisers and audiences, extracting value from attention in the name of connecting the “right” individual with the “right” ad. American platforms tend to work by taking a specific, singular market or service and envisioning this market or service as a set of datafied relations, where the platform provides a means to link two entities in a contingent and flexible manner through the measurement and optimization of data analytics. As American platforms extend globally, they perpetuate this model and enact “data colonization” in multiple ways (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).

When contrasted with Chinese platforms the limited articulation between platform and function in American platforms becomes obvious. Chinese “mega-apps” or “super-apps” integrate countless, often totally distinct services and markets within the same platform, crossing industries that are elsewhere separate (cf. Cristofari, 2023, p. 113; Steinberg et al., 2022). Jia et al. (2022) describe how the conglomerate Tencent, the owner of WeChat, links conglomeration and financialization, techniques more often associated with media conglomerates, to create an app that becomes a complete “infrastructure,” a “one-stop shop of digital serves for the ever-mobile Chinese society” (p. 1443). Financialization is central to the expansion of both Tencent and other Chinese tech companies, like Alibaba, whose national and international growth derives from the ability to use these platforms for a range of financial activities—though hostilities between the United States and China have created limits to this global financial expansion (Zhang & Chen, 2022). Those familiar only with the American model are often surprised by the sheer number of social and financial activities one can perform through WeChat—which includes, beyond banking and messaging, the ability to make reservations, schedule travel, pay utilities, apply for visas, and even file for divorce.

While it is true that the capacity for platforms to achieve large-scale vertical and horizontal integration is inherently regulated by national policies toward corporate conglomeration and integration, it is not as if this general drive toward varied synergies and integrations can be limited to state policy. And, while it is also true that not all platforms can be positioned into this US versus China opposition, the national differentiation of capitalisms provides a spectrum where one model (the Chinese mega-app) is positioned as an ideal for platform capitalism to be achieved by platforms from other nations (cf. Hoskins & Wang, 2023), an ideal prohibited both because of national policy and because of popular suspicion toward platforms. While the United States may technically prohibit some level of monopoly, often a more significant barrier toward the popularity of mega-apps beyond China is user suspicion and trust (cf. Clark, 2022), where users are aware that a combination of social networking and financial transactions, for instance, could place personal data at risk when it comes to data breaches and hacking.

Regardless, we should not presume that these two models describe mutually exclusive directions for platforms. According to Dal Yong Jin (2017), “US-based digital platforms have continued to dominate or influence the [Korean] market, constructing a new form of imperialism” (p. 210), following the usual route US global expansion has taken. Korean corporations Naver and Kakao have provided an alternative to the US platforms in Korea, and Chinese platforms Baidu, QQ, and Weibo have also become popular. Both Naver and Kakao seem to follow the Chinese model. They originated by offering a single function, expanding to encompass others, sometimes integrated into a single platform, sometimes distributed over a range of semi-differentiated platforms. Naver, for instance, began as a search engine. Kakao began as the corporation behind the messaging app KakaoTalk. In 2014, Kakao merged with another major Korean platform, Daum, which began as a general web portal providing a variety of services (email, search, shopping, news, insurance). The different functions of Naver or Kakao are rarely subsumed into a singular app. Some of the earliest successes of Naver and Kakao were associated with very specific functions, such as the popular distribution of “Webtoons” (J. H. Kim & Yu, 2019), and many of the functions of these media corporations are, today, often divided between distinct if semi-integrated apps and platforms which mostly include Naver or Kakao in their names. Sometimes the ownership of these corporate behemoths is completely obscured. Naver, for instance, is the owner of Wattpad, which it purchased in 2021 and primarily operates in North America (Wattpad, 2021).

Aside from examples like Wattpad, both Naver and Kakao’s global expansion, primarily into Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, occurred initially through a reliance on contracts with K-pop corporations SM Entertainment and the Hybe Corporation (Park et al., 2023), enacting a form of platformed “digital soft power” through the global reach of Korean popular culture (Jin, 2024; Jo & Jin, 2022). In 2015, Naver introduced V Live, a popular video live-streaming and fan platform that cemented K-pop as a primary means to globalize Korean corporate platforms (Park et al., 2023, p. 2427; cf. Jin, 2017, p. 227). Because of the popularity of V Live, both SM Entertainment and Hybe Corporation developed their own platforms in its wake—SM’s Lysn in 2018 (which has given rise to the Dear U Bubble app), SM’s Kwangya Club in 2023, and Hybe’s Weverse in 2019. Hybe acquired V Live in 2022, incorporating it into Weverse, shutting down the original V Live service at the end of the year (V Live, 2024). Naver currently has a 49% minority ownership stake in the Weverse Company because of this merger with V Live (NAVER Corporation, 2022). Kwangya Club was exceptionally short lived and shut down on 11 September 2023. All of SM Entertainment’s artists who used Kwangya Club subsequently moved to Weverse (Y.-J. Cho, 2023).

Our point is not to suggest that platforms develop along the lines of either globalized imperialism or vertically integrated, financialized conglomeration. While the first tends to describe American platforms and the latter Chinese mega-apps, these tendencies exist in both American and Chinese models of platform, and a corporate “ideal” is to suggest that both tendencies are desirable. In the Korean context, while local platforms can, to some degree, conglomerate successfully, attempts to globalize platforms have drawn on the popularity of K-pop and entertainment, which has led the major K-pop corporations to develop their own vertically integrated platform ecologies. Korean platforms increasingly seem to desire control over “their own exclusive global digital fandoms” (Shin & Whitaker, 2023, p. 692). The production and ownership of global content would, then, not inherently reflect the national origin or ownership of the platform, with Weverse, Kakao, and Naver “becoming owners of global intellectual property and global businesses—as global platforms that just started in Korea” (p. 692). This would represent a global “Koreanization” of music and entertainment via the fan ecologies associated with K-pop. This is particularly ironic in many ways, as the rise of Korean platforms coincides with a range of national social crises involving income disparity and class stratification (pp. 695–709).

We now turn to a more detailed discussion of the corporate history and development of Weverse, along with its associated Weverse Shop—platforms linked with the expansion of Korean cultural industries into American markets. What we see here is how fandom—an activity that has been understood as essential for media industries but often unruly or uncontrollable—can be potentially appropriated by a platform, globally integrated into a circuit of capital.

The Hybe Corporation and the Economics of Global K-Pop

We now want to provide some background on the corporate development of Weverse and the reliance on K-pop as a means to globalize Korean corporate interests. This requires some further discussion of the Hybe Corporation, the Korean entertainment company founded and chaired by Bang Si-hyuk, a songwriter, producer, and record executive known popularly as “Hitman” Bang. Initially named Big Hit Entertainment, Bang’s company went public in October 2020 with one of the largest IPOs in Korean history. Through the valuation of this IPO, Bang became the sixth richest person in Korea, his wealth reaching US$3.8 billion at the time. Bang is most known for developing and marketing the K-pop group BTS, which he formed in 2010 after signing to his label the rapper and eventual BTS group leader Kim Nam-joon, popularly known as RM. Bang has been active in the writing and producing of BTS’s songs along with those of the many acts signed to his labels; he is credited with co-writing six of the songs on BTS’s 2016 album Wings. BTS’s massive global popularity is central to the success of Bang’s company. Shortly before going public, the seven members of BTS were reported as each receiving 68,385 shares of the company from Bang’s own stake. At the time of the IPO, these shares were valued between US$15.39 million and $20 million per BTS member, with Bang retaining a 36.6% stake in his company (S. Kim & Kim, 2020; Stassen, 2020).

This brief narrative foregrounds one conjunction represented by the popularity of BTS—a conjunction between entertainment and capitalism in which the “center” of cultural production is not the United States. However, this “de-centering” of American media industries neither challenges assumptions of global capital and its relation to media, nor does it challenge the financializaton of entertainment or the role of billionaire conglomerations in the entertainment industries. While the popularity of BTS may be “counter-hegemonic,” representing a rewriting of the global boundaries of entertainment (J. O. Kim, 2021), there are limits to this, just as there have been with other instances of global media that do not derive from the American cultural industries (see Allison, 2006). While BTS and Hybe are a specific embodiment of hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” the name for the global popularity of Korean film, television, music, fashion, and cuisine that dates back to the late 1990s and provides context for the global significance of Weverse and K-pop, there have long been questions about what hallyu represents nationally in terms of the cultural values embedded in Korean cultural exports (i.e., H. K. Kim, 2011)—in other words, the fact that Korean entertainment is globally popular may not inherently rewrite the boundaries of hegemonic capitalism, even if it may produce a new cultural center that exists alongside American media, and even if much Korean entertainment—film, television, and literature, in particular—is often thematically hostile to the incursion of global capital (Jeon, 2019).

Around 2019, while Bang’s company was still named Big Hit Entertainment, ⁵ it began to first horizontally integrate, concentrating its market share by acquiring other Korean music companies, such as Source Music (Kelley, 2019). It then began to vertically integrate, generating a music and entertainment conglomerate through such purchases as the game company Superb (E. Kim, 2019). The rebranding of Big Hit Entertainment as Hybe Corporation (or Hybe Co., Ltd.) in 2021 (often stylized as HYBE) signals an intensification of this concentration and conglomeration. Bang’s company was reorganized into three separate divisions (Choi, 2021; Stassen, 2021): Hybe Labels, which focuses on music and entertainment, including, among others, Big Hit Music (BTS’s label) and Source Music; Hybe Solutions, which produces video content, games, and educational products (J. O. Kim, 2021); and finally, Hybe Platforms, which primarily consists of the Weverse Company. While concentration and conglomeration are long-standing techniques media industries use to protect against the rate of profit to fall, Hybe’s embrace of a certain social media logic demonstrates how platforms can be employed as methods to secure and manage attention with the goal of subsuming fan activities as a part of the corporate cycle of capital accumulation. What we see with Hybe and Weverse reinvents a specific and long-standing opposition—the antagonism that arises between media corporations and fans—to account for and manage this opposition, hedging against a future in which fans deviate from the corporate desires of media industries.

Hybe sees its app as central to the global expansion of its media empire, adding artists associated with rival record labels to the app, like Blackpink, and musicians from Japan and the United States, such as AKB48 and Prettymuch (S. Kim, 2023). While some of Hybe’s ability to do this comes from the failure of SM’s Kwangya Club, its ability to vertically integrate has led to more global interest in Weverse than, say, Dear U Bubble. ⁶ In 2023, Weverse reportedly had 10.5 million monthly active users, and Hybe’s use of Weverse to advance a form of global K-pop can be seen in some of its attempts to expand into the US market—which also links Weverse with other platforms as well. For instance, Hybe partnered with American-based Universal Music Group’s label Geffen Records to create the group Katseye. Katseye’s members are from America, Korea, the Philippines, and Switzerland, and were chosen via a streaming audition competition titled The Debut: Dream Academy, which aired via YouTube and the Japanese streaming platform Abema. A Netflix documentary series, Pop Star Academy, about the formation of Katseye, was directed by Nadia Hallgren, who previously directed the documentary Becoming, about Michelle Obama (Fekadu, 2023). Hybe has installed as the CEO of Hybe America the controversial manager Scooter Braun (Vendrell, 2023a), who previously managed musicians including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, and Kanye West, and was at the center of the 2019 controversy over Taylor Swift’s master recordings (Grady, 2019). But while this strategy relies on other platforms to popularize global K-pop, Hybe’s goal, as of 2023, is to include in Weverse all Hybe’s “fan-related services,” which include the streaming of albums and live concerts, merchandise, and chat services. Ads and paid memberships were scheduled to be added to Weverse in 2024, and the current CEO of Weverse, Joon Choi, has noted that the app is not yet profitable, but ideally will be once the platform has around 30 to 50 million monthly active users (Vendrell, 2023b).

The global multimedia product that is Katseye, publicized and produced through many different media platforms linked with different national economies, suggests a unique understanding of globalization and media integration. Hybe is currently willing to cooperate with other global media platforms to publicize their own commodities, limiting their own activities to the specific management of musicians, their music, and fan activities associated with specific acts. Ironically, given the debt to V Live, streaming video (beyond concerts) is currently beyond their business plan, and thus other video platforms (Netflix, YouTube, Abema) are used to generate global interest for a band explicitly advertised as, in the words of one of its members, making “American pop” while “trained to do the crazy choreography of K-pop” (quoted in George, 2023). Katseye is imagined as a global hybrid of popular musical styles and dancing traditions, intended to capture a global audience for K-pop by simultaneously being “of” multiple national contexts—Katseye could even be interpreted as an allegory for the precise corporate strategy that guides the global expansion of Weverse. And while Hybe partners with countless other platforms to promote their artists, as we will see, the corporation explicitly uses Weverse to direct and manage specific fan engagement with the musical properties they produce—while one may see Katseye on YouTube, Netflix, or Abema, fans can only supposedly communicate with the members of Katseye on Hybe’s own platforms. Partnerships with other platforms and the production of a global business strategy with notable CEOs installed to direct and account for the particularities of different national contexts are, in the end, absorbed into the platforms of Weverse and the Weverse Shop to singularly engage and direct global fan activities.

Weverse and Weverse Shop

Hybe approaches Weverse as a means for governing the interactions between individuals, understanding fandom as an activity to be harnessed for capitalist extraction of attention and desire. Those of us in media and cultural studies have long acknowledged the role of fans as a generally ungovernable group that resists and remakes the meaning of the commodities they consume, engaging in a hegemonic struggle that refuses to consent to corporate interests in dictating the uses and meanings of a media commodity. But, as has equally been acknowledged, seeing audiences merely as a source of active resistance ignores how capitalist political economy dictates the limits and possibilities of fan agency (cf. Kline et al., 2003). As well, foregrounding only the resistance of fans ignores how the materiality of media constrains through physical affordances, where both “fan” and “medium” are mutually constitutive (Bollmer, 2015).

Our goal here is to keep these three sources of agency in mind—the agency of audiences, of capital, and of medium—while examining how the design of a corporate social media platform attempts to harness the attention and affection of fans. There are nonetheless limits to platform fandom, and much of what we chart in this section highlights how Weverse both succeeds and fails in its attempt to capture and control the desires of fans. Much of this failure seems to emerge from the limits of a transnational audience separated by multiple languages. Resistance comes not from any intentional act but from the sheer difficulty of generating a global public in which audiences cannot be truly subsumed into a single entity due to linguistic diversity. At the same time, this difficulty reinvents what it might mean to be a fan—if fans once were part of a community, a public derived from care for cultural products, then what we see with Weverse is an atomized understanding of fandom where community is circumvented, replaced with a singular parasocial relationship between an individual fan and the musician or idol they obsess over—something that replaces community with devotion to what is, ultimately, a corporate product.

This relation between community and idol is particularly contested within global K-pop fandom. Global K-pop fandom has been framed as a form of “cosmopolitanism” that enables global solidarities facilitated by digital media that overtly attempt to direct these solidarities toward profit-making ends (Keith, 2023). Groups like BTS (and by extension Hybe) have regularly used new technologies—including fads like blockchain technology—to encourage fan creativity while also maintaining control over intellectual property (Yoon, 2024, pp. 67–68). At the same time, the global dimension of K-pop has led to significant distinctions between fans in Korea and those from other countries (James, 2024, p. 49). While some scholars have been positive about, for instance, fans of BTS organizing in support of social causes such as Black Lives Matter (M. Cho, 2022), others have found that attempts to address anti-Black racism in Korea or Black cultural appropriation in K-pop are exceptionally contested (McLaren & Jin, 2020, p. 112n3). Attempts to discuss social issues like Black Lives Matter within K-pop fandom are aggressively dismissed with racial slurs or other digital tactics like “doxxing,” the nonconsensual sharing of personal information and “documentation” online to harass, used in this context to call out those “acting out of line with acceptable fan behavior online” (James, 2024, p. 49). In other words, the context of global K-pop fandom is one in which the interests of Hybe—to create a global entertainment platform that places Korean cultural industries at the center but is not inherently or solely “Korean”—conflict with problems that emerge from the global scale of K-pop fandom. Hybe seeks to address—or circumvent—the politics and problems of a fandom that has multiple and contested interests and investments, crossed by nation and global cosmopolitanism, which cannot exclude internal conflict, strife, and the use of harassment tactics intended to discipline other fans. Yet, it is this specific global dimension of fandom that underwrites both Hybe’s promotion of its own platform and broader industry interest in Weverse.

Weverse was initially launched in mid-2019 by benX, a subsidiary of Hybe. Hybe released a series of “Corporate Briefings with the Community” on YouTube throughout 2019 and 2020 (Hybe Labels, 2019, 2020), in which a representative of Weverse explained their purpose and vision for the app and for Weverse Shop. In these briefings, Weverse was presented as a platform-driven method of enhancing customer service. Weverse was envisioned to become the “core of the Big Hit ecosystem,” an all-in-one stop for fans of Big Hit artists that would include personal communication with groups and purchasing and consumption of media and merchandise. Hybe emphasized that Weverse was especially beneficial for overseas fans who would otherwise find it difficult to access artists, merchandise, and other media products associated with specific musicians and groups. The representatives of Weverse mentioned that the platform was designed to facilitate direct interaction between fans and artists. The company even had plans for a 2020 version of Weverse that would link fans with services such as local transport and lodging for attending concerts; these plans never materialized due to COVID-19. A 2021 briefing was organized around the key term “Boundless,” in which Hybe expressed their desire to expand entertainment boundlessly across nations, cultures, and languages (Hybe Labels, 2021).

In 2020, Fast Company ranked Hybe fourth in their list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies,” placed as such because Weverse enabled Hybe a seemingly unprecedented ability for “mobilizing (and monetizing) music fans.” Describing a series of sold-out BTS shows in Seoul, Fast Company detailed how:

some fans bypassed long merch lines by preordering items via the e-commerce app Weverse Shop . . . which offers exclusive band-related products. Others checked wait times for food kiosks and posted messages to BTS members through the social networking app Weverse. These services weren’t built by tech startups, but by a subsidiary of [Hybe], the Seoul-based music management and production company that represents BTS and other artists. Launched last June, the apps are part of [Hybe’s] plan to build a “one-stop service within the music industry,” says co-CEO Lenzo Yoon, akin to the transactional “super apps” popular in parts of Asia. Weverse Shop now boasts 1.8 million users from 200 countries; Weverse has 1.4 million daily users. (Mehta, 2020)

Fast Company’s discussion demonstrates something similar to what we have been arguing above. On one hand, Weverse and the Weverse Shop follow the Chinese model of super-apps by integrating multiple services and functions into one, with a financialized logic of consumer capitalism at its center. However, at the same time, the app presents itself as limited to fans and fandom. There is no real purpose of Weverse beyond engagement with the specific musicians and groups associated with the app, and specific functions—engagement with idols and musical groups, the purchasing of merch—are delegated to what appear to be separate platforms.

A Brief Walkthrough of Weverse

We now turn to a description of Weverse and the Weverse Shop, following some of the considerations of the “Walkthrough Method” (Light et al., 2018), which draws on the concerns of cultural studies and STS research to examine the design of an app’s interface and how it relates to the corporate vision built into an app. While there are limits to the Walkthrough Method, especially in the context of apps and platforms that obscure algorithmically driven mechanisms of personalization (Duguay & Gold-Apel, 2023), we follow the original intentions of this method, searching for the affordances built into Wevere’s interface and how these affordances reflect the corporate plans sketched so far. The main conclusions to be drawn from this walkthrough are the following: Weverse, through the integration of translation features and fan communities, attempts to foster a global, international “community” surrounding various K-pop stars. However, the actual interactions between fans are minimal, and instead the platform is intended to almost entirely foster commodified interactions between musicians and fans.

When logging into Weverse for the first time, one is given the option to select between Korean, English, and Japanese as the primary language of the app. The account one creates to join Weverse can also be used in the Weverse Shop (and is, in fact, required to be, as many of the purchases made in the Weverse Shop—for memberships and streaming albums—must be linked with other apps to function). Weverse is organized according to specific musicians and groups, and users are invited to join “communities” for these groups or idols upon their first interaction with the app—the initial home screen one sees is comprised of rotating ads for albums by and live performances of featured Weverse artists, an empty space to eventually be filled by “My communities,” and a list of some of the most popular or notable musicians and groups on Weverse. For each group or musician, there is an icon—most often a logo, but occasionally a photo—with an “explore” button underneath each. If you click on “explore,” the app takes you to a general page for a specific group, which, at the top of each screen, contains a photo of the musician or whole group and their “debut date” or their birthday (which are expressed in terms of number of days before or after the current date). If there are multiple members of a group, the group page also includes links to profiles for each member, who can be followed individually. Some of these individual profiles contain a significant amount of content or information, some (for less established groups) may only contain the birthdays of individual members.

One is invited to visit the “community” for each group, which users must join to access updates and conversations from other fans and other content from the group itself. One is also permitted to change one’s username for each community one belongs to (perhaps to permit users to create individualized names speaking to their dedication as a fan that nonetheless remains variable and mutable depending on the specific community—some fans choose names that are variations on the band’s name itself or the names of specific idols). Community content includes feeds of videos and updates from the group’s members, images and videos posted by the group (announcing things like birthdays for group members, or including television episodes that they appear on), and livestreams. Some content is restricted to “Membership Only,” which involves paying additional fees to access exclusive content, becoming a premium member of a group’s fan club. After you join an artist community, you are automatically subscribed to notifications whenever the artist posts an update. On Weverse, there are also multiple links for a “Shop”—both a general shop, at the bottom of the screen, and specific artist shops, available through the community page of the artist. Clicking the general “Shop” at the bottom of the screen leads to a landing page broken up by group and artist, though, as of our writing, this link initially keeps one within Weverse itself. Clicking on “Shop” within a specific artist’s page, however, leads to a link to the website of Weverse Shop, taking the user outside of Weverse and onto Hybe’s e-commerce platform.

As the audience courted by Weverse is global, and the majority of the artists on Weverse are Korean, users are given the option to automatically translate posts into another language. Beyond the three languages used by the app offered at signup, the translation embedded into Weverse has several additional options—including Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and Hindi. On each post, users are given the option to translate what others have posted. Feeds for specific artists speak to the global nature of their fans, with posts in multiple languages, including some—like Arabic—that may not be successfully translated by Weverse’s auto-translate feature. ⁷ Posts are often not translated accurately, though perhaps more significant is the fact that many posts seem to be a combination of spam, offers for sexting, and complaints that other features of the app aren’t working. During the periods we were researching this article, feeds were filled with posts of fans writing “Good morning!!” or “horney” or generic self-help type affirmations like “An apology without change is just a manipulation.” Some of the most popular posts were of selfies or pictures of favorite group members. Fan-to-fan interaction on the site seems minimal. Several of the most popular posts in the most popular communities (i.e., BTS, Blackpink) offered to respond with “aesthetic things!!” in reply to a username, gender, or location. Many posts seemed directed to specific group members in an attempt to be acknowledged.

There are varied means to interact with artists embedded into Weverse, each of which seems intended to produce a feeling of direct interaction, transcending parasociality, as though the artist is directly sending something specifically to a user. Fans are encouraged to write “fan letters” to groups and their members, which might be a combination of stickers, photos, and text. Yet fan letters are public, visible to the artist and other community members, and members of a group—who also have their own screen names, for instance, Rosé of Blackpink is “Rosieposie” in the Blackpink community—often respond with photos and video that are also publicly visible. It is also possible for fans to post general community updates that are hidden from the artist, in case they want to post or state something that they’d prefer to be hidden from the object of their fandom.

Weverse Shop serves as a portal through which users can buy albums and other merchandise. It includes a rewards program, which functions through the QR scanning of items that are bought; credit is accumulated and can go toward other purchases on the app. In 2020, when tours were canceled and concerts were performed virtually, tickets were exclusively sold on the app, rather than other ticketing agents or platforms. Perhaps most notably—and one reason that the purchase of goods is delegated to Weverse Shop rather than included directly in Weverse—not only does each artist have a “shop” dedicated to their albums and merch, but these shops are divided into three regions: Global, USA, and Japan. Some artists may have all three regions available, but others may only have one or two. This suggests that the Weverse Shop is designed to accommodate national and regional regulations in terms of music licensing and merchandising. To again refer to Blackpink as an example, the Global and Japanese Blackpink stores within Weverse Shop contain a wide range of tour merch, books of photos, and the premium membership kit for access to all Weverse content on Blackpink’s page. The USA store, however, only includes versions of Blackpink’s album Born Pink. Merchandising rights in the US for Blackpink are controlled by the Universal Music Group, as Blackpink is a notable group featured on Weverse that is not under Hybe’s management.

There are two conclusions we want to make from this brief walkthrough of Weverse and Weverse Shop. The first conclusion intersects with some of the arguments with which we began. When it comes to the globalization of entertainment and the use of platforms to achieve this, while the drive may be to foster an app that is horizontally and vertically integrated, there are limits to this globally concentrated and conglomerated corporate form that emerge not only from national regulation of platforms, but the international regulation of intellectual property, licensing, and rights. The splitting of Weverse and Weverse Shop suggests that fandom can be globally concentrated and conglomerated, but the specific process of underwriting sales requires the acknowledgment of region-specific legal rights regarding the manufacturing and selling of branded merch. Thus, a limit to the creation of a single, global super-app dedicated to fandom comes partially from the fact that fan activities are guided by the consumption of commodities that are often manufactured and sold within the boundaries of national and global contracts—here, there is a limit on the financialization that characterizes these apps and their globalization. Second is that the “fandom” we see within Weverse is, we might suggest, a degraded form of fandom. The parasocial relationship between an individual and the pop idol replaces other social bonds created among other fans, limited by a platform that, while ostensibly fostering a global public, fragments fan interactions on the basis of language and other technical means designed to encourage an affective attachment to a star. This degraded fandom would suggest that the design of Weverse fails in its stated goals. Most likely, the communities for K-pop are simply organizing elsewhere, on platforms like Discord, Tumblr, or Twitter (now X), and Weverse is used for accessing exclusive content and purchasing merch. We will now draw out some of the implications of this degraded fandom for media and cultural studies research regarding platform technologies.

The Platforming of Global Fan Publics

As we have already mentioned, the study of fans has long been central for the development of media and cultural studies as an academic field. In recent years, the study of fans has shifted dramatically, as it is clear that “toxic” and “anti” fans, among other fan phenomena, indicate that we can no longer presume an inherent resistance in the range of activities that constitute fandom. When it comes to K-pop fandom, particularly, fans are actively encouraged by media industries to have a high level of devotion to specific objects (embodied in idols), resulting in a “righteous toxicity” in which various fans attack each other, even referring to personal tragedies like suicide, as they compete to be the “best” fan of an idol (Mercier, 2022).

There are, of course, precedents to this form of fandom—the history of any sort of pop ensemble from The Beatles to the Backstreet Boys to One Direction to BTS generally involves some sort of affective investment in individual members of a group—though the transnational, global dimension of fandom fostered by the internet inherently strains the ability of fans to police the boundaries of who is a “real” or “true” fan, working to protect a subculture through efforts to antagonize those who are not “authentic” enough. Samantha James (2024) has provided some of the best examples of how these tendencies play out in global K-pop fandom. Even though, for instance, K-pop fans regularly mobilize in favor of particular social issues, there is constant conflict between “I-fans” (or “international” fans) and “K-fans” about “the goal of a fandom or the hopes for a K-pop group” (p. 48). These conflicts often involve “gatekeeping other fans, restricting information access, bullying, and drawing attention to fans who acted improperly . . .” (p. 48).

In a sense, traditional understandings of fan agency presume audiences to follow, to some extent, a model of rational-critical public, in which the shared interest in a media object or product leads to debate and, ultimately, agreement over aesthetic judgments. Fandom is communal, organized around taste, even if the objects of fandom are “illegitimate” from the standpoint of traditional arbiters of cultural taste (even though this hasn’t been truly the case since the 1980s). But “toxic fans” reveal an erosion of community, in which competition to become the “best” fan—to reside at the top of an internal hierarchy—can be seen to result in hostilities and antagonism. As being the “best” fan would presumably make one an object of desire or interest for the idol one obsesses over, fandom ceases to be a collective, communal activity, and instead becomes a competitive activity in which one wants to become an individual that is themselves worthy of attention. It is this precise condition that is leveraged—and intensified—by a platform like Weverse.

Weverse, in creating a global platform for fandom that individualizes and atomizes the relations between different fans, both through the problem of automatic translation and through a technological encouragement of a visible, yet individualized relation between a user and an idol, harnesses the problems and potentials of toxic fandom and relies on fandom as an individualized rather than a collective activity. It should be acknowledged, though, that many K-pop fans are skeptical, if not opposed, to platforms like Weverse. As Sarah Keith (2023) has argued, that platforms like Weverse obviously represent “technocratic efforts to extract value from K-pop” and “conceives of fans as standardized consumer-participants in global cultural and economic flows” is not lost on fans themselves. This does not mean that these platforms “are unsuccessful, or universally disdained by global K-pop fans” (p. 41). Even though there is little evidence for these platforms’ “success” in capturing fan community, it is also obvious that the corporate desires of Hybe and other Korean entertainment conglomerates seek to enclose fans through the affordances of platform media. An individualized affective intensity is substituted for collective reflection, and attachments to other people are replaced with attachments to corporate “friends” and products (cf. Bollmer & Guinness, 2024). Admittedly, it is a limitation of this article that actual fan activity on Weverse was discussed only briefly, though our findings here follow the arguments of other writers like Keith. Future research could work to study how fans use other platforms in conjunction with the financialized relations that are built into Weverse and the Weverse Shop.

“Platform fandom,” here, is the technical support required not only to bring together individual users with these corporate products, but also to provide a means of separating fans from each other, harnessing toxicity and antagonism within what were formerly fan communities. It relies on an apparatus that also links global media products, negotiating affective attachments with intellectual property and branding. In the specific context of Weverse, platform fandom also reveals how K-pop is at the forefront of some of these transformations, and how the globalization of Korean popular culture and entertainment relies on a global negotiation of fans, capital, and technology. Even though much Korean popular culture associated with the varied Korean Waves is often heavily critical of the power of capital to produce resentment and antagonism (Jeon, 2019), the global audiences desired by K-pop corporations like Hybe nonetheless reproduce similar antagonisms in which collective agency is replaced with individual obsession with corporate objects—obsessions encouraged and maintained by platforms.