HYBE representatives attended an audit with the National Assembly on October 24, 2024. The audit revealed internal documents which affected the company as they contained information not only about their own groups, but also comments about other companies’ groups.
The documents caused much dissent on social media. One such document revealed the company’s plans for negative media play regarding SM Entertainment groups such as aespa, RIIZE, and JYP Entertainment’s NMIXX. According to a snippet of their internal documents, they had planned negative media play for aespa’s Coachella live singing, releasing past photos of a RIIZE member, accusing NMIXX of pandering to feminists, criticizing ZEROBASEONE and DKZ‘s visuals, and more.
not hybe running the huge aespa coachella negative mediaplay just for their own gg to do the worst out of all years later 😭 https://t.co/PToKU0rAum
— ☘︎ (@nwjnsbts) October 24, 2024
On October 24, 2024, HYBE quickly released a statement on their official website.
This is HYBE’s official statement. On October 24, the company documents used for monitoring at the audit by the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Tourism were publicized, leading to various reactions by fandoms and industries, as well as articles from the press.
The contents (industry direction and issues) were only shared with a small portion of internal staff for reference and simply reflected the reactions from social media and online communities verbatim, and does not constitute HYBE’s official stance.
The report in question also contains positive reviews from fans and things that people in the entertainment industry should take note of.
Provocative parts of the report were cherry-picked and leaked externally to make it seem as if HYBE had criticized other artists in our documents. We will make the powers that conducted this take responsibility to the end.
— HYBE
The statement was quickly removed from their official website.