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June 23, 2020 02:07 pm

K-Pop Stans' Trump Prank Ratchets Up the Internet Wars

Optimism about the internet's role in politics peaked around the time of the Arab Spring, then steadily collapsed into alarm and despair until this weekend, when it ticked up again after President Donald Trump held a disappointing campaign rally. From a report: There are various ways to interpret the lower-than-expected turnout at the Tulsa, Oklahoma event, but among the most intriguing was the claim from a group of Korean pop fans that they'd undercut the campaign by coordinating to reserve thousands of tickets, then not showing up. They are likely giving themselves too much credit. Still, the narrative took hold for online observers as an example of a rare bright spot in the social media hellscape. The surge in activism from young Korean pop music enthusiasts has been one of the stranger plot lines of a uniquely unsettled time in American politics. Working together, they've rendered Twitter hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter useless by filling them with music video clips, and they crashed a mobile app established by the Dallas Police Department to collect evidence of illegal activity at protests by overwhelming it with data. This has gripped the imagination of some internet commentators, who noted how young people have reconstituted their "lightning-fast coordination and prodigious spamming abilities" for what the fans believe are righteous political causes. But spamming has historically been seen as a bad thing. When right-wing trolls coordinate to do things like pollute hashtags, pile onto people they dislike or disrupt the process of government it's regularly described as a serious threat to democracy. The tactics are remarkably similar, though the end goals are different.

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