Less than a week after disappointing attendance figures at a recent rally by U.S. President Donald Trump were widely attributed to the online activism of K-pop fans, disinformation experts say that the tactics deployed by this community mark a potential turning point in how information warfare is waged on digital platforms.

“This generation and these groups of people have a more sophisticated understanding of the way that information is used for political purposes,” said Dr. Al Baker, a senior editor at Logically, a UK startup that uses artificial intelligence in fact-checking news. Earlier this week, the organization published a report that examines how K-pop fans have clogged up certain online channels and suppressed antagonism towards the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Baker explained via Zoom that fans were targeting far-right conversations and hashtags like #whitelivesmatter with a tsunami of music videos and GIFs to wipe out far-right campaigns before they could gain traction. “It’s a tactic that avoids virality — because the whole point was to keep the campaign within this isolated community and not have it spread.” 

K-pop fans and TikTokers found themselves in the headlines last weekend after claims that they coordinated an effort to register hundreds of thousands of tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While Brad Parscale, the chairman of the president’s re-election campaign, posted on Twitter that more than a million ticket requests had been fielded, attendance at the event was much lower than expected. Though it is not clear how many fake registrations were submitted, only 6,500 supporters materialized, according to the Tulsa Fire Department.