How K-pop fans and TikTok users came together to humiliate Trump in Tulsa – Matthew Rozsa (Salon) / June 22 2020
The Trump campaign touted RSVPs in the hundreds of thousands, but the Tulsa rally was only one-third full
It sounds like the start of a joke: What do Korean pop music fans, video meme apps, and the president of the United States have in common?
It turns out quite a lot.
During the build-up to President Donald Trump’s reelection rally in Tulsa, Okla., the K-pop fandom and TikTok users urged their followers to reserve hundreds of thousands of tickets to the event, even though they had no intention of attending.
This could have been little more than a low-profile online prank. But when Trump’s Saturday rally rolled around, the Tulsa Fire Department estimated that only 6,200 people showed up at the Oklahoma Bank Center, which has a seating capacity of 19,000. It is impossible to know for sure how much of this was due to the trolling campaign, but from a PR standpoint it was a major humiliation for the Trump campaign — and a public relations triumph for online activists.
TikTok, a video social media site akin to Vine popular with Generation Z and millennials, has a major subculture of politically active, mostly left-leaning users who often organize through the ephemeral app. The political leanings of Western K-pop fans, who are also largely young, are more multifarious; though perhaps unsurprisingly, the fandom has a pluralistic and multicultural bent, which puts them in opposition to Trump.
Continue to article: https://www.salon.com/2020/06/22/how-k-pop-fans-and-tiktok-users-came-together-to-humiliate-trump-in-tulsa/
