K-pop fans disrupted a Donald Trump rally: how did they achieve this level of influence online?
Korean pop music fans are so powerful that one can imagine they could troll the President of the United States, like at his meeting in Tulsa.
That was the big question of the weekend: Are K-pop fans and TikTok users really behind the fiasco at Donald Trump's last meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma? On the night of Saturday, June 20 to Sunday, June 21, the US president showed up to an unusually empty stadium. According to the New York Times, users of the TikTok application and admirers of Korean pop claimed (in part) the responsibility for this fiasco, claiming to have reserved hundreds of thousands of tickets to make believe in an immense enthusiasm around this meeting. .
On Twitter, one of the authors of the article explains that she did not think that this joke was responsible for the few public present, "but that it had pushed the campaign to promote bogus figures which undoubtedly skewed the expectations of the public, which made this fiasco even worse ”.
This affair once again placed Generation Z (born from 1997), “tiktokers” and K-pop fans in the spotlight. The New York Democrat elected to the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also given a laudatory message to them. “K-pop allies, we also see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice,” she wrote.
Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2020
Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud. ☺️ https://t.co/jGrp5bSZ9T
Already supporting Black Lives Matter
This is the second time in less than a month that K-pop fans have gained media attention. They had already stood out a few weeks ago for their involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, whether by giving the movement a little more visibility, by drowning supremacist hashtags or by attacking an application of the Dallas, Texas police.
As with the Anonymous movement, it is complicated to envision K-pop fans as a homogeneous block, explains in a column to the Guardian Tamar Herman, journalist and author of BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears (in English, not translated) , named after the ultra-popular BTS group:
Re-upping this in light of all the rally discourse. Once again — K-pop stans are not a homogenous group, and these viral moments tend to shape how we think of them in a way that doesn't contend with the fandom's racism and anti-Blackness. https://t.co/cib7KBafHg
— Palmer Haasch (@haasch_palmer) June 21, 2020
“While it's easy to say 'K-pop fans' to qualify this movement, it's not centralized, official. These are just individuals who happen to be K-pop fans and use their combined values to make things happen. There is great diversity within this group. "
"It's hard to generalize," confirms CedarBough Saeji, visiting professor of Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington, USA. “What is interesting is that outside of Korea, in the United States or in France, they are often from minorities. Many academics have already mentioned the fact that K-pop can be an alternative space with other models and which allows one to move away from the idea of consuming a hegemonic culture. There is a postage side. "
Huge punching power
The heterogeneity of this movement can also be explained by its size. According to a study conducted by the Korea Foundation, nearly 100 million people are associated with fan clubs related to South Korean pop culture around the world (mainly K-pop and series). While most are in Asia and Oceania, the foundation estimates that there are 15 million in Europe and 12 million in America.
One of the great strengths of some of the K-pop fans is that they are very present on the web and "they are very good at performing shows of force to show their influence." online ”, explains Michelle Cho, professor and researcher at the University of Toronto.
Twitter is probably the social network where this hitting power is most visible. In January, he indicated that K-pop groups and their fans dominated him in terms of numbers: 6.1 billion messages had been exchanged in 2019, or almost 17 million per day, or 11,000 per minute. “Their ability to dominate online conversation topics owes nothing to chance: learning how to give visibility to their favorite band is part of the K-pop fandom,” summarizes the MIT Technology Review:
“Fans are learning tactics to help their bands explode into YouTube views. Groups of fans stream the new music videos and tracks to YouTube and Spotify for hours. They create memes and share them widely. They are so good at fiddling with social media numbers that people who discover K-pop in action may, at first glance, mistake accounts for bots. "
In 2019, Korean group BTS was the most engaged musical artist on Twitter, ahead of Ariana Grande, Drake, Rihanna, Cardi B, Justin Bieber or Beyoncé.
A social movement
But until then, political displays of force were rare, as CedarBough Saeji explains:
“K-pop has always been more social than political. We are used to seeing K-pop fans working on reforestation projects or building houses in third world countries, for example. And the stars ask them to get involved in it, rather than sending them gifts. "
However, seeing some fans adopt a more political posture is not surprising, she says, recalling that many of them do not share Donald Trump's values:
“They were [already] talking about social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement is a social justice movement. They are 20-30 year old Americans, whose political views are the opposite of Trump's. They are open to the world, want to know more about other languages, other cultures. After the death of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, these young fans who were already politicized and who, for some, experience systemic racism in their everyday lives, felt they could use the same techniques. And rather than supporting their favorite group, they could flood a hashtag of a nationalist group and prevent it from organizing. "
But such a spotlight on their abilities also raises questions about a possible future recovery. "When a group effectively uses these algorithms, its supporters tend to celebrate it," sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi, social media movement specialist, wrote on Twitter:
“In 2012, when a few of us tried to warn that Facebook's role in elections was not healthy for democracy, it fell on deaf ears. It took 2016 to realize that tools don't always stay in the hands of the same. People should be wondering how this is going to be turned into a weapon - because it will - and what will happen to the public sphere. How could we design things for healthier results? "
This is what sociologist Gabriella Coleman, interviewed by the MIT Technology Review, fears: “Some corners of the far right will innovate in response to all of this. They are not yet visible, but will eventually be. "
