it was revealed that a popular Facebook page 'Idol Issue' is owned by Kakao and biased towards kakao affiliated groups.
The page often negatively targeted Newjeans, Lesserafim ITZY and NMIXX (the direct competitors of IVE) creating scandals and negative articles.
Kakao is known to be heavily affiliated with Starship Entertainment…in fact they own around 60% of shares in starship.
It does make me feel a bit suspicious because this is exactly the kind of trickery that is present from many huge media cooperations, but there also could be an argument that IVE’s success is organic - they do have great songs and Princess Wony.