Matilda, help! I have come across something called Elite/Alt TikTok. Have Elon Musk and Grimes renamed their baby?
Ha, no. So, to understand Alt and Elite TikTok you first need to understand how TikTok started. In the beginning, the platform was essentially a bunch of genetically blessed teenagers lip-syncing to popular songs and repeating the same five or six trendy dances over and over again. There is an upper echelon of popular creators, including Addison Rae, Charli D’amelio and Chase Hudson, who are popular with kids, very brand-safe and have millions and millions of followers. Think of this side of TikTok as “Straight Tiktok”. “Elite TikTok”, “Alt Tiktok” or “Queer TikTok” is the anti-capitalist rebellion to this.
The content is all on the same platform, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Alt TikTok replaces relatable dances with pure chaos. Soundtracks are distorted and unsettling, and rather than coveting brands and material possessions, users are obsessed with frogs, beans and pretending to be the official TikTok accounts for Walmart.
There is no way to “find” Elite Tiktok, you just have to be strange enough, or cool enough that the videos you like and spend time on will mean the algorithm will let you into this exclusive club.
Crystal clear. All of that sounds eminently sensible and productive. But now Alt TikTok (let’s call it that, ‘elite’ troubles me) has been trolling Donald Trump. How has it managed to bewilder this very stable genius?
The thing about Alt TikTok is that it’s all about being part of the in crowd (it is elite, remember) so this whole Trump rally saga began as just another inside joke.
Essentially it all started when @TeamTrump posted to Twitter suggesting that people reserve seats for Trump’s infamous Tulsa rally in a few days’ time. It was free to reserve tickets, and it only took a passing knowledge of how to create dummy email addresses and get fake numbers off Google Voice to make multiple accounts and notionally reserve hundreds of seats.
So that’s exactly what Alt TikTok encouraged people to do. Most of the TikToks were deleted or made private after a few days, but hundreds if not thousands of small creators posted instructions on how to reserve tickets to ensure the 19,000-seat stadium would be nearly empty when the president himself rocked up.
“Man, it would be a shame if people knew you could reserve tickets for Trump’s Tusla rally for free,” said a TikTok user, Triippmusic.
“Man, it would be a bummer if the only real information you needed was the area code which was 74103.” The video has nearly 200,000 likes and 18,000 shares.
The wildest thing about this plan is it seems as though it might have worked. Before the rally, Trump’s team was boasting that more than 1 million people had expressed interest, but when it began there was only about 6,000 people in attendance, with photos of vast empty rows plastered across global media.
While it’s extremely difficult to prove that fake bookings actually caused any genuine Trump supporters to lose seats, figures from both sides of politics have attributed the low turnout to the campaign. As the New York Times reported, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez gave a shoutout to “Zoomers” and the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said “the teens of America have struck a savage blow againstDonald Trump”.
K-Pop is somehow involved in this. Can you explain the political weaponisation of Korean boy bands?
K-pop Twitter is a huge subsection of the social network that is is obsessed with Korean pop bands such as BTS and Black Pink. It has close ties with Alt TikTok and shares the ability to act en masse when it comes to social media activism. You may remember that it flooded the “White Lives Matter” hashtag with random posts to make it nearly impossible for white supremacists to use the hashtag to spread information.
The callout to book Tulsa tickets also spread across its corner of the internet, to apparently great success.
Being serious for a moment: this subversion is being applauded by some on the progressive side of US politics as a spectacular win over the conservative establishment. But what if it were a Joe Biden rally, and the interference was from Chinese citizens on Weibo? Is it just because it’s Trump?
I think the answer might be that it’s both, and in the end it will be history that decides if these frog-loving, K pop-befriending internet weirdos are heroes or villains.
On one hand it’s a bit of a laugh; some teens found a funny flaw in the Republican party’s plans for a controversial rally and managed to make some silly old rightwingers believe that more than a million people wanted to come to their event –only to be embarrassed when barely anyone turned up.
On the other hand, it’s a group of nameless and faceless internet trolls who have purposefully disrupted an election campaign event by the president of the United States. Not to mention that vast numbers of accounts originate from a foreign country (in this case, Korea), and TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance.
But I guess as Xoomers would say, “It’s not that serious, bruh.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
