This was the only story 2020 was missing.A disturbing conspiracy theory about this new K-pop band has fans of the genre in shock on social media. On December 19th, just one month and two days after the launch of Aespa, a strong controversy broke out about the real intentions of SM Entertainment behind the launch of the avatars of the 4 girls in the group. Keep reading to find out everything that happened in the media and what the final outcome was.
All the controversies that have surrounded Aespa since their announcement
As we mentioned before, Aespa had to face controversy since the moment they were announced to be released.
First, there was talk about offensive comments by the leader of the band, Karina towards members of senior K-pop bands like BTS.
Karina was accused of calling the group members ugly and criticizing her own company(SM) in a chat that was later declared false.
Giselle followed her in the rumors about the past of the Aespa members.
The 20-year-old Japanese rapper was accused of substance abuse and was even suspicious of being a bully in the past.
These rumors were also proven false and silenced by the record label.
Despite everything being a simple rumor, the reality is that these controversies end up affecting the popularity of the group.
Nor should we forget that these girls are only teenagers and this kind of information can affect their psyche.
A new controversy threatens the popularity of Aespa
The new SM Entertainment and Aespa scandal focus on a very delicate matter indeed.
Lee Soo Man's company was accused of teaming up with a Chinese AI agency, supposedly banned in countries like the USA, for technology development behind the new girl group.
As we already know, Aespa has an innovative concept of augmented reality, and it has been announced that each girl will have an assigned avatar in order to interact more closely with the fans of the band.
Apparently, SM had joined a company that seems to be part of a group of six agencies banned in different parts of the world for being considered anti-Islamist.
iFlytek is included in this list and accused of having voice recognition devices to track Uighurs (a group of Turkish ethnicity-based mainly in the northwest of China).
Several Internet users urged their followers to stop supporting Aespa for this reason and not promote the group under any circumstances.
Fans' reaction
The MYs are very offended by the situation and are requesting all those who published this news to retract under the hashtag #ApologizeToAespa.
According to the followers of the band, this news is totally false, and they have been able to prove it by confirming that SM actually joined an AI company based in California called ObEN, in order to develop all the technology associated with Aespa.
The group's official fan club even sent a letter to SM Entertainment with the title Protect Aespa that includes all the Twitter addresses of Internet users who campaigned against the band.
So the issue could reach greater. Hopefully not!
Conclusions
I personally think that the 4 girls definitely don't deserve to be involved in so many scandals and that we should focus more on their music and talent.
It would be a shame if Aespa was forgotten by these rumors, and we could not enjoy all their wonderful abilities.
I also think that part of the origin of these controversies is due to fanaticism towards other important groups, which we won't name so as not to start a new controversy.
The final message would be that we try to respect each other and that it is necessary to do a rigorous investigation before releasing news as delicate as these without real grounds since with this we can hurt others a lot.
Let's start spreading the love!