NPR: K-Pop's Digital 'Army' Musters To Meet The Moment, Baggage In Tow
June 24, 20202:00 PM ET Heard on Morning Edition HAERYUN KANG
A week before President Trump held his controversial campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., was when Viviana Dark, a K-pop fan from Wisconsin (who has requested pseudonymity over concerns of online harassment), first heard of plans to "sabotage" the event. Users on TikTok, the exceptionally popular social-video platform, were urging others to reserve tickets to the rally, with no intention of actually going. "You know how a TikTok challenge happens? It was kind of like that. 'Everybody go do this!' And it spread like wildfire," Dark, 19, tells NPR Music.
She signed up for two seats, received a confirmation email from the Trump campaign — "I'm counting on my loyal supporters like you" — and never showed up to the rally, which drew just a few thousand supporters to the 19,000-seat auditorium on June 20.
It's not clear how much TikTok teens and K-pop fans should be credited for the rally's disappointing turnout; Trump's campaign originally claimed it received more than a million requests for tickets. A stage prepared for overflow was never used.
Dark, who supports the girl groups TWICE and GWSN, is no stranger to political activism in coordination with her K-pop community. She has a Twitter group chat with fellow idol fans from all over the world, where they exchange info about stars, petitions and hashtag movements. To "clog up" the platform, she tweeted #WhiteLivesMatter and #KeepAmericaGreat hashtags, coupled with irrelevant fancams of her favorite stars, as a way of diluting the usefulness and relevance of the tags.
"I'm Black before I'm a K-pop stan," she says. "The main point of why we were fighting was for the Black Lives Matter cause, not to get recognized [as K-pop fans]."
But getting recognized they are, as "maestros of social media," "an unexpected ally," "unlikely heroes." This month, fans of BTS matched the boy band's $1 million Black Lives Matter donation in roughly a day. Others are credited with flooding the iWatch Dallas app with fancams (and sinking its App Store ranking) after the Dallas police asked people to report "illegal activity" from the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests.
Read much more here: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882867577/k-pops-digital-army-musters-to-meet-the-moment-baggage-in-tow
No comments:
Post a Comment