Trolling the Far Right on TikTok

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 is E. Brooke Phipps, whose focus is on how TikTok activists in the US fight conservatism and disinformation. This can be seen as a form of trolling directed at disinformation propagators, and thus turning a prominent practice of the far right against it: tactical trolling has now also emerged as a key form of digital resistance by left-wing activists (also in South Korea). This is also a youth practice: nearly half of all TikTok users are understood to be younger than 30 years. TikTok as a place is important here: place is a product of and producing social relations, and the infrastructure and affordances of TikTok make it a very specific place.

The specific case examined here is the initiative to troll Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 18 June 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and on the day before Juneteenth. TikToker fans of the Korean pop group BTS organised to register en masse for the rally in order to prevent actual Trump supporters from attending it, and actively exploited the TikTok algorithm by strategically commenting on key videos in order to make them more visible; the video posters themselves also used key hashtags in order to engage with specific communities (like K-Pop fans and BTS stans) on the platform. This acknowledges that there is a specific place for these fans on the platform, and the language used in the videos uses a reversal or irony (‘I’m not saying, but…’) to give a nudge and a wink to viewers who were in the know.

These strategies were an unmitigated success, and highlighted even in the mainstream media. Later on, these activities pivoted towards combatting disinformation in general, for instance by posting videos of themselves trolling the Trump campaign’s ‘voter fraud hotline’ with prank calls to the point where the hotline was eventually shut down.

Could such well-intentioned trolling be extended to combatting medical disinformation, then? There are a few examples of how this has been attempted already, and TikTok may provide a particularly valuable arena for exploring these practices further.