BRITs 2018: Little Mix fans furious as Harry Styles wins Twitter vote amid trend confusion

The category was decided by a public vote via Twitter, with fans asked to use hashtags such as #BRITVOTELITTLEMIX to back their favourites.

Little Mix, Styles, Liam Payne, Zayn with Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran were the final five – and #BRITVOTELITTLEMIX was trending throughout the broadcast.

This, coupled with screengrabs from the BRIT Awards site, led many to believe that the award was going to be Little Mix’s – they were nominated for Touch.

Alas, the winner was revealed to be Styles, who was not present at the O2 Arena.

A storm soon erupted online as the girlband’s trend continued to remain on the Twitter sidebar. #BRITVOTEHARRYSTYLES began trending soon after the show – with Twitter showing more than 300,000 tweets backing him across the evening.

It’s worth noting that Twitter’s trending bar isn’t necessarily decided by what’s been most tweeted-about. Plus, it was pointed out that only one tweet per person per day would be counted in the vote – so even if one person tweeted the hashtag multiple times, it would only have been counted in the BRITs vote once, despite contributing to the trend.

What’s more, the BRITs’ live-updating page could have had a delay, with Styles getting a late surge. That seems even more likely when you consider that some fan screengrabs show Styles was leading very soon to the vote closing – so perhaps it needed more time to update afterwards.

Whatever the case, one fan raged: “@LittleMix were leading when the voting was CLOSED and Harry won? Sorry, but something can’t be right here. So sick of this doppelstandard when it comes to awarding women. #BritVoteLittleMix #BRITs2018.”

“Isn’t it funny that #BRITVOTELITTLEMIX IS STILL TRENDING but we didn’t win any award,” said someone else.

See everything that happened at the BRIT Awards here.