To be clear: TikTok’s algorithm wasn’t responding to the word “algorithm,” as if the users were calling its name. The users just understood that under the hood, TikTok (like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) was essentially a big math equation, adding up the weights of a bunch of different signals to decide how much reach each post would receive. By commenting any text on the post, they could add a few points to the “comments” column, driving the total reach of the post up a little bit.
One comment in particular amassed more than 70,000 likes. The account that posted it, which said it was a 21-year-old named Yesenia, had made only one post. The comment said, “Bro get kpop stan on this.”
K-pop “stans,” for those unfamiliar, are fans of Korean pop supergroups like BTS and BLACKPINK. There are millions of them in the United States and around the world, and they are generally young, passionate, and extremely online.
In summer 2020, K-pop stans became famous for disrupting bigoted online movements by “flooding the zone” with wholesome memes. In the week before Trump announced his Tulsa rally, a group of white supremacists began posting on Twitter using the hashtag #whitelivesmatter. Within hours, use of the hashtag soared, but anyone who actually clicked on it was met with photos and videos of K-pop artists, songs, choreography. The racist posters, overwhelmed and wrong-footed, reorganized under the hashtags #whitelifematters and #whiteoutwednesday, only to quickly find those hashtags flooded with K-pop too.
The week before #whitelivesmatter, K-pop devotees had set their sights on Dallas, where the Dallas Police Department had launched an app through which citizens could upload reports of “illegal activity from the protests” following George Floyd’s death. A 16-year-old K-pop fan tweeted asking her followers to “FLOOD that shit” with footage of K-pop stars. “Make it SO HARD for them to find anything besides our faves dancing,” she wrote. The next day, the Dallas Police Department announced that its iWatch app had experienced “technical difficulties” and was down.
Just minutes after Yesenia’s call to mobilize K-pop stans, replies started streaming in. “We heard u sis we on it,” one wrote. “We here now,” quipped another. “On it” said a third, who posted the comment with the “nailcare” emoji, often used to convey sass and confidence. Anti-Trump TikTokers without K-pop ties cheered the stans on, and made their own posts tagging K-pop accounts, calling them to action, and thanking them—as several commenters put it—“for their service.”
On Friday June 12, less than 24 hours after Laupp posted her video, Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted that over 200,000 tickets had already been reserved for the rally. Later in the day, he wrote: “Correction now 300,000!” and, two days later, “Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.” Trump himself also tweeted: “Almost One Million people requested tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!”
TikTokers reposted the tweet with gleeful comments: “Who requested all those seats though!?”
