To be clear: TikTok’s algorithm wasn’t responding to the phrase “algorithm,” as if the customers have been calling its identify. The customers simply understood that beneath the hood, TikTok (like Instagram, Fb, and Twitter) was basically an enormous math equation, including up the weights of a bunch of various indicators to determine how a lot attain every submit would obtain. By commenting any textual content on the submit, they might add just a few factors to the “feedback” column, driving the overall attain of the submit up slightly bit.
One remark specifically amassed greater than 70,000 likes. The account that posted it, which mentioned it was a 21-year-old named Yesenia, had made just one submit. The remark mentioned, “Bro get kpop stan on this.”
Okay-pop “stans,” for these unfamiliar, are followers of Korean pop supergroups like BTS and BLACKPINK. There are thousands and thousands of them in america and around the globe, and they’re typically younger, passionate, and very on-line.
In summer season 2020, Okay-pop stans turned well-known for disrupting bigoted on-line actions by “flooding the zone” with healthful memes. Within the week earlier than Trump introduced his Tulsa rally, a gaggle of white supremacists started posting on Twitter utilizing the hashtag #whitelivesmatter. Inside hours, use of the hashtag soared, however anybody who really clicked on it was met with photographs and movies of Okay-pop artists, songs, choreography. The racist posters, overwhelmed and wrong-footed, reorganized beneath the hashtags #whitelifematters and #whiteoutwednesday, solely to shortly discover these hashtags flooded with Okay-pop too.
The week earlier than #whitelivesmatter, Okay-pop devotees had set their sights on Dallas, the place the Dallas Police Division had launched an app by way of which residents might add stories of “criminal activity from the protests” following George Floyd’s loss of life. A 16-year-old Okay-pop fan tweeted asking her followers to “FLOOD that shit” with footage of Okay-pop stars. “Make it SO HARD for them to seek out something apart from our faves dancing,” she wrote. The following day, the Dallas Police Division introduced that its iWatch app had skilled “technical difficulties” and was down.
Simply minutes after Yesenia’s name to mobilize Okay-pop stans, replies began streaming in. “We heard u sis we on it,” one wrote. “We right here now,” quipped one other. “On it” mentioned a 3rd, who posted the remark with the “nailcare” emoji, usually used to convey sass and confidence. Anti-Trump TikTokers with out Okay-pop ties cheered the stans on, and made their very own posts tagging Okay-pop accounts, calling them to motion, and thanking them—as a number of commenters put it—“for his or her service.”
On Friday June 12, lower than 24 hours after Laupp posted her video, Trump’s marketing campaign supervisor, Brad Parscale, tweeted that over 200,000 tickets had already been reserved for the rally. Later within the day, he wrote: “Correction now 300,000!” and, two days later, “Simply handed 800,000 tickets. Largest information haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.” Trump himself additionally tweeted: “Virtually One Million folks requested tickets for the Saturday Evening Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!”
TikTokers reposted the tweet with gleeful feedback: “Who requested all these seats although!?”