The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Could an army of teens really bring down the President?
How did a troop of Tiktok users and ‘K-pop stans’ – fans of South Korean pop music who come together on social media to champion, or sabotage, causes they feel strongly about – become one of the greatest political forces in 2020? Harry de Quetteville investigates the growing power of these young activists – and asks whether they could shape the outcome of the US election
On 11 June this year, Team Trump, the US President’s official campaign organisation, tweeted news to its 1.8 million followers. ‘WE’REEEE BACKKKKK!’ it announced. ‘President @realdonald Trump will be in Tulsa, OK on June 19 for a Make America Great Again Rally!
‘Register for your FREE TICKETS on the “Trump 2020” App or visit the link below.’
For those critical of Trump’s history of race-baiting, the rally was an outrage in both time and place. Not only would it fall on a holiday commemorating the emancipation of slaves, but Tulsa also remains notorious as the site, in 1921, of one of America’s worst spasms of racist violence.
Users of Tiktok, a hugely popular social-media app for sharing short videos, were not slow to respond. Snappy tutorials circulated demonstrating how to apply for tickets. But their creators were not Trump fans. Quite the opposite. They were intent on humiliating the President by applying for tickets and then not showing up.
And it seemed to work. Four days after the original tweet, Trump announced: ‘Almost One Million people request tickets for the Saturday Night Rally [it had by then been moved to the 20th] in Tulsa, Oklahoma!’ In fact, an online movement was brewing to provoke and mock him. Often its members were Gen-z-ers (or ‘Zoomers’), born between the late 1990s and 2010, many too young to vote. In a particular gesture of comic contempt, some posted videos of themselves showing off their ticket confirmations for the rally – which they had no intention of attending – while performing the Macarena. In the end, the 19,000-seat venue appeared largely empty in photographs.
The Trump campaign blamed the media, but some of the President’s political adversaries disagreed. Among them was the influential Democrat Alexandria Ocasiocortez, known to her fans as AOC and to one pro-trump tweeter as ‘an embarrassing, barely literate moron’ – a sentiment Trump himself retweeted. ‘Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on Tiktok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID,’ Ocasiocortez tweeted.
In her post she made it clear whom she credited for humbling the world’s most powerful man: ‘Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud.’ But then she also tipped her hat to another group quite outside traditional American political discourse: ‘Kpop allies,’ she added, ‘we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too.’
K-pop is not some American political acronym. It stands for Korean pop – a scene dominated by boy and girl bands who often blend US hip-hop influences into their music, and whose fiercely dedicated fans are overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) in their teens and 20s, and – particularly beyond Korea – left-leaning. Many live in other Asian countries, as well as the US. Superfans, known as ‘stans’ (the word is said to be derived from an Eminem song, Stan, about an obsessed fan), have for years honed collective action in the service of their idols – flooding televised or social-media polls, Youtube, radio-station callins or itunes to ensure their favourite groups are, or at least appear, more popular than their rivals.
Not for nothing. K-pop is a dog-eat-dog business.
Every year, up to 70 new groups debut, trying to dislodge one of the 50 or so already on the circuit, says Cedarbough Saeji, an academic at Indiana University’s Institute for Korean Studies. ‘Most don’t even make it to the second release,’ she continues. ‘It’s a cut-throat market.’
One of the most popular at present is BTS, a boy band nicknamed The Korean Beatles. Earlier this year, their album Map of the Soul: 7 sold four million copies before it was even released. And last month Filter became the band’s sixth track to reach number one in the US itunes chart.
K-pop bands, like politicians, depend not just on recruiting supporters, but also on ensuring that those supporters turn out when it counts in order to propel them to number one. So when you compare the costly, relentless, ruthless competition for attention and exposure that characterises both the K-pop industry and contemporary presidential politics, the two endeavours have more in common than, after Tulsa, it first appeared.
Now two juggernauts of modern digital culture have become adversaries. In one corner stands Trump, who has demonstrated time and again that he is a master of
social media’s notoriously combative arena. But the K-pop stans facing him should not be underestimated. Their numbers alone are formidable: last year K-pop was the subject of more than six billion tweets – about three per cent of the global total
On top of the sheer scale of them, there is their dedication to causes they focus on, as well as cohesion and online savviness. So how far could the K-pop stans go? Having helped to embarrass the world’s most powerful man once, might they do it again? And could they actually swing the outcome of November’s US presidential election?
K-pop activism could ‘absolutely become a powerful instrument for change’, says Sheridan King, a K-pop fan, who describes herself as a ‘24-year-old mixed-race girl’. ‘It’s already starting to make waves. People are starting to take notice.’
Indeed, the tactics of K-pop stans are almost perfectly designed to undermine anyone thin-skinned or those, like President Trump, who seemingly can’t help but rise to provocation. ‘There’s a humiliation factor that Trump now has to overcome,’ says Euny Hong, the Korean-american author of The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture .She says this is a potential Achilles heel, which could be exploited again and again.
When other Trump adversaries – some from his own party – have created snappy video assaults on his character in response to breaking news, the President has at times been unable to resist responding, fanning the flames of the attacks. ‘How much embarrassment can one candidate take before he cracks?’ says Hong. ‘It’s already starting to happen. Trump’s reaction is the problem for the Trump campaign.’
Ultimately, though, it is at the ballot box that the campaign will be decided, and election day could prove the ultimate example of stans’ ability to mobilise. ‘I won’t be surprised if we see some huge fan campaign, telling people to get out there and vote in November,’ says King. ‘I could definitely see that happening.’
K-pop stans have already proved that their digital determination can reap real-life social and political rewards. Take the Black Lives Matter movement. Many a bemused white nationalist, communing under the hashtags #Whitelivesmatter and #Bluelivesmatter (a countermovement, advocating that those who are convicted of killing law-enforcement officers should be sentenced under hatecrime statutes, which sprung up in the wake of #Blacklivesmatter and is seen by some as racist), has logged on to social media recently to discover a barrage of adoring footage of Korean singers. This is a classic tactic: deploy en masse and flood extremist hashtags with videos of favourite stars, drowning out the hate speech with spam, and rendering the hashtags useless.
A similar fate befell the Dallas Police Department when it tweeted a call for footage of ‘illegal activity from the [Black Lives Matters] protests’. Stans sprang into action: ‘Spam with fancams, spam with fancams.’ A host of K-pop fans obliged. Instead of mobile-phone videos of rioting, or looting, the Dallas PD was deluged with images of sensationally choreographed, beautifully coiffed K-pop performers.
It’s unsurprising the fans chose BLM as a cause to champion. ‘When you look at K-pop fandom outside of Korea, it is largely made up of minorities – whether that be racial minorities, religious minorities or sexual minorities,’ says Sheridan King. ‘So when you get to something like K-pop fandom supporting Black Lives Matter, I think that’s the natural progression.’
However, until now K-pop groups, and the stans who follow them, have largely been ignored in the West, despite being among the biggest acts on the planet. Last year BTS’S album sales outstripped every Western album, with the exception of Taylor Swift’s Lover. Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran were among those left trailing in BTS’S wake.
This year, in honour of Map of the Soul: 7, countless BTS devotees have modified their social-media usernames to include a superscripted ‘7’. On online threads directing spam at Trump or the Dallas PD, the 7 was ubiquitous.
Thousands of BTS stans mobilise on social media under the name ‘ARMY’ (which stands for ‘Adorable Representative MC for Youth’). The BTS ARMY Twitter account in South Korea has 4.4 million followers, its US splinter 610,000. The official BTS account has more than 27 million followers, which sounds plenty – but is still dwarfed by Trump’s 84.3 million.
Nonetheless, ARMY has already shown that it can be a powerful force. At the beginning of June, after the band tweeted their support for Black Lives Matter and made a million-dollar donation, members of the BTS ARMY called on fans to #Matchamillion. In little more than a day, tens of thousands had helped them blast through that goal.
One of the fans who organised the fundraising effort is Erika Overton, a 40-year-old New Yorker who says she ‘fell down the K-pop rabbit hole’ in 2017. She points out that not all K-pop fans are young. ‘The age diversity is incredible,’ she says (though she concedes that most are between 15 and 35).
After discovering BTS and watching their music videos on Youtube, she discovered ARMY on Twitter. ‘It was like entering a new university,’ says Overton. ‘I encountered a family. A global family… It’s like being in arms together, there are some battles you have to face together.’
She also came across the corps of ‘fan
‘How much embarrassment can one candidate take before he cracks? It’s already starting’
translators’ who examine and convey the meaning of each of BTS’S lyrics and speeches. As one fan told me: ‘I spent days scrutinising the lyrics and most of them are powerful and essential. I was mesmerised by the message they put in their music.’
This obsessive devotion is in service of a BTS world view that few parents would disapprove of: the band espouses social consciousness and self-worth, and has partnered with Unicef on a campaign. ‘Their public behaviour is humble, they never cause a fuss, never punch a photographer, never trash a hotel room, never have sex with a groupie,’ says Cedarbough Saeji. ‘These are good upstanding members of society… someone you could take home to meet Mom.’
So where exactly did the K-pop trend come from? Though it has only recently become a buzzword in the West, the genre burst into life in 1992, with the debut album by a trio called Seo Taiji and Boys. From the start they appealed to young people, many of whom considered themselves outsiders. And yet the biggest internal contradiction in this is that K-pop is the ultimate establishment corporate creation. Or, as Euny Hong puts it, ‘a master plan that the Korean government and industry had in mind.
‘Excessive government funding in cooperation with private industry was very, very carefully organised, centrally organised, at the level of the Ministry of Culture, where they used public funds to research the market and ways that they could export popular culture,’ says Hong.
The wider master plan that led to Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, began in the 1990s. And it didn’t just target music. Film and television, food, fashion and video games were all involved. Evidently, it has worked. In February, the standout triumph at the Oscars was that of Parasite, a South Korean production, which became the first film with a non-english script to win best picture.
However, alongside this master plan, a number of other factors also propelled K-pop into the stratosphere, including the country’s early adoption of high-speed internet and local social-media platforms (long before Facebook or Twitter had been invented), and the global expansion of social media that followed. ‘The fan stuff rose in tandem with the internet and social media,’ Hong says. The question now, given the sheer power of the K-pop stans, is how that power is used. And by whom. The answer is not always clear. On one hand, good can come out of it. Erika Overton points me to a map listing the hundreds of Bts-fan charity projects around the world. ‘As an organised and a cohesive force, we are starting to recognise that there’s a lot that could be done here with this amount of power,’ Overton says. She calls it ‘flexing the power of the fandom’.
But the aforementioned lack of clarity is where the danger lies. In fact, Euny Hong believes that there are certain parallels with the recruitment of terrorists. This is because, while K-pop fans may sometimes appear to act as a homogenous group, the pattern is more complex than that. In reality, they celebrate their individuality before suddenly coming together as a flock (for example, to support their chosen pop groups or political causes) – and then they disperse once again. ‘You can recruit [terrorists] remotely in a way that’s untraceable because they’re actually pretty autonomous,’ explains Hong. ‘K-pop is similar. They seem to be acting as a hive, all based on these cells, and there is… the possibility of transmission of ideas between themselves.
‘It just happens now that there is a huge anger and backlash against Trump. But it’s impossible to be certain and optimistic that it will always be used for justice and equality, fighting racism and taking on good causes.’
Isil, President Trump and K-pop – it seems outrageous to lump them together. But what all three do have in common is an understanding of the power of online communities to recruit and motivate passionate members or supporters around the world.
For young people who feel politically under-represented, the digital activism of K-pop stans to date may be a taste of things to come. Because above all, K-pop has taught its fans that if they want to effect change, then they must vote. ‘Often fans have had to band together to vote for award shows, [or] to organise to break [sales] records,’ says Emily Wang, a 21-yearold stan, who lives in Vancouver. ‘K-pop stans have long been armed with the ability to assemble and organise over a short period of time, so this is quite the transferable skill, even when it comes to non-k-pop political events.’
Certainly something seems to be brewing. November’s election may be too soon, Trump too adept an online adversary. But that doesn’t mean the political world does not need to sit up and listen.
‘This is the most effective, non-violent, and sincere social movement,’ argues Dal Yong Jin, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. ‘Over the next several years, this kind of online protest… will be the new social movement that young people who live online every day pursue in order to achieve social justice. Fandom activities will influence younger generations to participate in political actions, including their voting rights. They are becoming bigger and more significant.
‘Politicians,’ he continues, ‘cannot ignore the stans.’