This past Sunday was the Billboard Music Awards and everyone was blown away by who won Top Social Artist.

  Being the first ever K-Pop group in history to be nominated and win Top Social Artist at the BBMAs, BTS shocked many present as they beat well-known artists including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Shawn Mendes.

  The category for Top Social Artist is one of the two awards that are fan-voted. Fans could vote by either going to the BBMA’s voting page or tweeting one of the nominees’ official hashtags. However, for the voting there was a limit of 100 voters per day, per platform.

  According to Buzzfeed, “#BTSBBMAS, the hashtag for the group on Twitter, was used more than 300 million times alone before the awards.” Such a massive number, resulted with BTS as this year’s Top Social Artist.

  For the past six years, the award was accepted by Bieber. Lots of people at the event believed that it would come down to Gomez and Bieber, but in the end, neither of them came out on top.

  The aftermath of the BBMAs was mainly about this award. Thousands of people on Twitter were making racist remarks about the outcome. Some of these remarks included, “What are these asians and why does it seem like the entire audience knows who they are?”

  Fans were appalled by how others reacted about BTS’s win. Hana Diatalevi (11) said, “I think that it shouldn’t matter if they are a K-Pop group. If they are more popular, they deserve the award. From what I have seen, they won the award by a landslide. So obviously they are doing something right to get all this attention.”

  An anonymous source was happy about BTS’s win. She said, “I think it’s really a great achievement for [BTS]. Becoming a nominee for a Billboard [award] is not an easy task, even for an American artist… they won for a reason. It was for Top Social Artist, so for it to be decided through social media is appropriate. They deserved to win.”

  Media awards are becoming more diverse. This is the social change that needs to happen as the society we live in and how we’ve evolved is from a “black and white” world.