Read on Twitter
I'm wary of wading in to the whole "TikTok teens and Kpop stan heroes ruined Trump's rally" narrative because conversations about the causes of crowd sizes and the effects of virality are both easy to manipulate and pretty much always more complicated than they seem, but...
The whole "register for Trump's rally and don't show up" idea has been around for a bit, particularly on millennial/Gen X #Resistance Twitter. It trended a couple times last August as an idea: https://worldofwonder.net/a-gay-teen-tweeted-to-reserve-tickets-to-trump-rallies-not-show-up-guess-what-happened/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/457782-emptyseatmagatour-trends-after-footage-shows-empty-seats-at
But this time 1) more people, esp on TikTok, were showing receipts and 2) the Tulsa rally was undeniably poorly attended. But all of these things are so squishy with cause and effect, and I'd recommend a little caution on going fully with the meme. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html
I guess the real thing that makes me wary is less about whether it's true, and more what it produces: older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don't understand.
There's a sense of ownership now with how normie liberals see TikTok teens and Kpop stans, and that worries me for a lot of reasons, esp. because it erases a lot of the nuance of the dynamics within these groups, which I wrote about a few weeks ago here https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/05/1002781/kpop-fans-and-black-lives-matter/
Memes like this also end up providing a blueprint for amplification, as the media looks to write more and more stories about what the Kpop stan heroes are up to next. And, simultaneously, these memes erase the issues within fandom. In Kpop, that includes racism against Black fans
It's tricky because this particular campaign is certainly worth covering: it did get significant traction online before the rally, and came at a particular moment that perhaps drove an idea like this to gain even more attention than it normally would. But also...
There's an incentive to write about this story in a way that uncritically amplifies the meme, or, alternatively, aims to fully debunk it. Neither is correct!!
Anyway I just bought Last of Us 2 and was looking forward to a normal, emotionally devastating sunday but i guess my plans have changed
This point is relevant today. And: the people who are paid to write and define what online culture means are overwhelmingly, like me, white. It deeply factors into why Black fan experiences are erased, simplified, and pushed aside in favor of "fun" memes https://twitter.com/abbyohlheiser/status/1269262376022540289
Anyway I turned this thread into an article https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/23/1004336/tiktok-teens-kpop-stans-trump-resistance-its-complicated/ ok bye
