On June 20, United States president Donald Trump provided a project rally in front of just 6,200 individuals. The stadium, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brings 19,000, therefore was notably empty, with row upon row of blue unoccupied seats; a second stadium reserved up nearby for overflow went unused. Trump’s campaign had boasted that more than a million individuals had actually registered to go to. A large internet group has laid claim to messing up Trump’s big day– K-pop stans.
WIRED UK
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK
A K-pop stan is just a passionate and active fan of Korean pop music (stan implies ardent fan)– frequently you’ll see them on Twitter with their photo altered to one of their heroes. The Tulsa ordeal is not their first participation in American politics. In Might, K-pop-stanning Twitter accounts pirated the white supremacist #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, flooding it with K-pop videos. In June, they crashed the Dallas Police Department app with countless fancams, short clips of Korean idols or groups carrying out live. Previously this month, when the Trump campaign asked users to wish the president pleased birthday on Twitter, they flooded the replies with rude messages.
The most recent trick was a cooperation with Gen Z TikTokers. A lady named Mary Jo Laupp motivated her followers to sign up for Trump’s rally, then not go to. Later, another user requested that K-pop stans get involved.
Ria, who is 16, based in the United States, and whose preferred K-pop group is the boyband BTS, found out about the strategy to prank Trump from other K-pop fans on Twitter, though she knew that the idea was circling on TikTok, too. “In these types of tasks there’s never a leader, everybody simply spreads the message. And considering that there are countless us it’s very easy to get something trending,” she says. “We also tried to keep it low-key– as you can see, nobody saw us coming until the real event happened and all of the tweets and TikToks were found by the media.”
Signing up was easy: Trump’s project was handing out two complimentary tickets per signed up phone. “I utilized my phone number and my parents’ phone number, I actually told them whatever that was going on and they liked it,” she says.
John Lie, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, states that K-pop became “export-oriented” popular music in the mid-1990 s. It explicitly count on the web and social media and the growing of fandom. Many people outside of South Korea
