In case you missed it Trump held
a campaign kick-off rally in Tulsa Saturday night. Only 6,200 people showed up. The upper levels of the stadium were empty
and his people took down the outside overflow area since only about two dozen
people were present there. (Russonello, 2020)
Only days earlier his campaign
had been bragging about having over a million requests for tickets. (Singman, 2020)
How did they get it so
wrong? Thank the Zoomers. Yes.
That's right Gen Z has rechristened itself as Zoomers. Interesting.
I wonder if it will stick. As a
Boomer who remembers the 60's, I am anti-war, pro-equality, care about the
environment and am concerned about police violence and gun laws in this
country. All the things Gen Z cares
about too. So it makes sense to me.
But let's talk about what they
did. K-pop stans used their amazing
organizing skills to order lots of tickets to the rally. Connecting through Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram
and Snapchat they posted not only encouragement for others to register for the
event, but also advice for those who did about how to hide their identities and
mess up the campaign's data mining efforts by creating fake phone numbers and
social media accounts for their dogs. (Lorenz, Browning & Frenkel, 2020)
Trump's team was so embarrassed
by the incident that they denied it happened and cast about for different
excuses for the poor turnout. They even claimed
that they knew about the plot but stopped it and got all that good data. Who knew they wanted to text dogs?
But the fact that on Monday Trump's
team had to shut down the online sign-up for his Tuesday rally in Arizona due
to fake applications, confirms the validity of the original story. And apparently Pence's rally in Wisconsin has
caught the attention of the teens as well. (Boswell, 2020)
Of late, K-pop stans have been
getting increasingly politically active.
In May, they spammed the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag. In early June they crashed the app the Dallas
police were using to track protestors. And on June 8th they sent Trump some
very special birthday messages. They
also matched a donation from BTS, the K-pop band with the biggest following and
raised $1 million for Black Lives Matter in 24 hours. (Coscarelli, 2020)
According to current estimates,
there are 89 million K-pop stans and they can be found in 113 countries. And, K-pop is the most tweeted about musical genre
- with 6.1 billion tweets in 2019.
Those that ordered tickets for
Trump's rally are likely Americans. And
many will be voting in the fall. They
have made it clear that until then they will continue to make themselves
heard.
132 days to go.
I can't wait to see what they do
next.
Russonello, G. (2020, June
22) Trump’s Tulsa Rally Attendance: 6,200, Fire Dept. Says. nytimes.com. Retrieved June 23, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/us/politics/trump-rally-coronavirus.html
Singman, B. (2020, June 15) Trump
campaign touts 1 million ticket requests for Tulsa rally. foxnews.com. Retrieved June 23, 2020, from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-campaign-touts-1-million-ticket-requests-for-first-rally-since-outbreak-of-coronavirus
Lorenz,
T., Browning, K. & Frenkel, S. (2020, June 22) TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump
Rally. nytimes.com. Retrieved June 23, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Boswell, J. (2020, June 22) EXCLUSIVE: Donald Trump's Campaign ABANDONS
online signups for his next rally and asks supporters to just turn up as Tik
Tok teens vow to keep trolling his events after Tulsa debacle. dailymail.co.uk. Retrieved June 23, 2020, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8448781/Donald-Trumps-campaign-ABANDONS-online-sign-ups-rally-TikTok-teens-vow-trolling.html
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