An account for a fake K-pop group called 6irly was created earlier this week, garnering over 2,000 followers before it was exposed.

Certain elements of the 6irly's conduct online led K-pop fans like Sophi Barbarics to believe that it was fake, including simple Korean phrases, English misspellings, and lack of a company website.

The incident is a testament to the ways fans make snap judgments and evaluate information in fandom spaces.

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If there's anything close to a universal truth about K-pop stans on Twitter, it's that they love community drama. Earlier this week, an account claiming to promote an upcoming Korean girl group called 6irly (i.e. "girly") circulated on K-pop stan twitter, quickly drawing in potential fans who initially believed that 6irly was a real group. The account amassed over 2,000 followers over the course of two days before its owners, who remain unidentified, deleted the account after a tweet from user @95vore exposing the group gained significant attention.

The entire incident is a testament to K-pop stans' willingness to clown, but more importantly indicative of how fans make snap judgments and evaluate information online.

A thread from @95vore, who is actually 20-year-old Sophi Barbarics, provided a neat timeline of 6irly's rise and fall. The 6irly account originally began tweeting on March 16 under the name "6irlfriend," a title that garnered attention for its similarity to current K-pop girl group GFriend. According to Sophi, fans of GFriend jumped into the replies of 6irly's (at the time, 6irlfriend's) first tweet, noting that the two groups had similar-sounding English names (GFriend's Korean name is 여자친구, yeoja chingu). That brought additional attention to the account.

From the start, Sophi was suspicious.

"I'm always wary of pre-debut groups that only have a Twitter account because this isn't the first time a fake group popped up," she said over Twitter DM. 6irly's account began to look more suspicious, and its new member introductions read like idol biographies available on sites like Kprofiles.

While digging, Sophi and other suspicious K-pop fans discovered that 6irly's hypothetical label, JCM Entertainment, hadn't been active online since the company's previous group, 4L, disbanded in 2016. After someone discovered that the second "member" of the group, who was introduced under the name Im Da-Eun, was actually Instagram user @ryun__aa, all bets were off.

After 6irly was exposed, the account stated that it only wanted to promote "nugu" (a Korean word that means "who" and is frequently used in a derogatory manner to describe less popular artists) girl groups."I'm guessing their main motivation was just to troll while laughing with each other about all the fans they tricked," Sophi said. "If they had gone, say, a week or two weeks without being exposed they definitely could have reached 10,000 Twitter followers." However, the account deactivated several hours later.

While the hoax was short-lived, a significant number of fans hopped on the 6irly bandwagon. Some created accounts to compile photos of the group; another created an account for updates on 6irly. K-pop profile websites like Kprofiles and Kpopping both listed profiles pages for 6irly that have since been deleted but remain indexed in Google search.

A Google search for the term "6irly" reveals that sites like Kprofiles and Kpopping created profiles for the group that have since been deleted. Google

This isn't the first time that this has happened on K-pop stan Twitter. In 2016, a fake girl group called Lion Girls circulated on Twitter and Instagram, garnering coverage from K-pop news sites like Soompi before Hunus Entertainment — supposedly Lion Girls' label — confirmed that the group was not affiliated with the agency.

Last year, the same thing happened in reverse with a group named Purplebeck, which debuted under a company called Majesty Entertainment in June 2019. The group's official account had been unusually friendly with fans on Twitter, following many of them back; after a tweet claiming that the company's address led to a 7/11 began circulating, K-pop fans by and large believed that the group was a scam. Eventually, Majesty Entertainment put out a statement clarifying details used in accusations against the group, which turned out to be real.

—k.⁷ i am a professional ear stylist (@jungkookcircle) April 23, 2019

K-pop fans make snap judgments on potential new groups. For many fans who don't speak Korean, short Korean phrases aren't as much of a red flag, nor are purposeful English misspellings or grammatical errors, which reinforce the notion that Korean (and broadly, Asian) non-native English speakers always speak in broken English. According to Sophi, other factors like a lack of a company website or the use of selfies as opposed to professionally produced teaser photos contribute to whether new groups come off as hoaxes.

Ultimately, it's a testament to the ability of misinformation to spread online, even in spaces with lower stakes like Twitter fandom. "People will believe what they want to believe, especially if it's harmless," Sophi said.