TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Spot the difference.
But we're also assuming that the K-Pop effort is the reason turn-out was low. Maybe people chose not to attend out of fear of the pandemic, and the teenaged K-Pop fans are just claiming credit for that low turnout.
Hopefully we can keep politics out of the discussion and just focus on the technical logistics of this story, which is what makes this interesting. What's verifiable is the success K-Pop fans have had taking over hashtags. Maybe this ultimately speaks to a vulnerability within Twitter: that they just never anticipated a mass/coordinated attempt to hijack a hashtag for other-than-intended purposes.
Yes, that's indeed true as well as your previous points have highlighted. It has become widely used as long as the audience is large enough to cause or force it to trend for their own purpose, which does sounds like this can be used as a tool for other purposes as you mentioned.
However, it means that this use-case can also be exploited by others or opponents which can do the same and falls under 'internet trolling' behaviour which is my argument to this article had this been done by anyone else.
Maybe Twitter and other political rallies will keep in mind about these similar coordinated 'trolling' attempts.