K-pop to the rescue? While there are many protesters using social media in order to expose police brutality of certain police officers in multiple cities during the ongoing George Floyd protests, there is at least one specific police department that is actually attempting to leverage apps towards a different direction and because of this, the department has been met with unusual backlash.
The Dallas Police official Twitter account started asking anyone who had any footage of the illegal activities during the protests to share it anonymously with the department's social media via its own iWatch Dallas app. The app is used as sort of a tipster app for those who live around the area to send certain photos, videos, or even audio recordings to the law enforcement for them to use.
If you have video of illegal activity from the protests and are trying to share it with @DallasPD, you can download it to our iWatch Dallas app. You can remain anonymous. @ChiefHallDPD @CityOfDallas — Dallas Police Dept (@DallasPD) May 31, 2020
Criticism
There have been several people who responded to this tweet with much disdain, questioning the mere intentions of the police department for asking for footage of the ongoing protests. The Texan officials have so far been met with the strongest responses of any other state as their governor Greg Abbott has officially declared a state of disaster, which means they would allow the federal teams to help their local law enforcement is strongly enforcing the curfews that have already been declared in major cities.
In the strangest crossover of this current year, it seems like K-pop fans have come to the rescue and have suggested users to flood the app with different videos of their idols' performances so that the entire police department monitoring the app would not be able to look for the real protest videos that others might have submitted!
The notion was quickly received and other people started sending a massive influx or performances from several artists and screen recordings of their own personal selections flooding the app with a great deal of content to hide the actual videos of protestors.
Read Also: Police Bodycam Audio Reveals George Floyd's "Murder" was Premeditated by Derek Chauvin, Says Lawyer
Time to stop
The people who started encouraging users to flood the app with videos in order to hide the actual protest videos that have been uploaded have quickly discouraged people to do so once they realized that the app actually requires the user to share some personal information which includes location before the user can upload a video. This is also in no way "anonymous" which was part of the previous Dallas PD's plea.
The app's reviews have also been amassing a great many ratings of single-stars with some references directly towards police brutality. Other warnings are given telling people not to download the app.
The app is down
Finally, the Dallas PD officially reported that the iWatch app is now down but there was no explanation as to whether it was the influx of K-pop videos that caused the app to shut down or if it was another reason.
