The teenage owners of the TikTok account called POCRepublicans have been forced to explain that their political content is purely satirical after being criticized on Twitter.
@pocrepublicans Salute to the SMARTEST President of all time ##duet with @franktheflowerhorn ##trump2020 ##trump ##politics ##republican ##democrat ##liberal ##conservative
They literally set themselves up for embarrassment like how can you be so dumb and proud lmaoo https://t.co/9LpmfsnjxO
— leena (@Khahbaa) July 7, 2020
After gaining a lot of serious interest from Republicans on TikTok, the account’s creator, Sarah Ma, put out a video on her personal profile explaining the confusion.
“I started the account POCRepublicans with a bunch of my Leftist friends on TikTok,” she explains. “It is so blatantly satirical that we have cited Reddit and Quora as sources.”
@sawahma This is madness. None of us are tryna get doxxed or anything. Please stop freaking out. I'm as shocked as you are that we gained 12k in < 2 days.
Ma goes on to clarify that all members of the group are posting from a place of irony, saying “Teddy made a video and cited Amtrak… AMTRAK, like trains, as a source for the video.”
TikTok’s 1-minute time limit seems to encourage a different, darker sense of humour than other forms of social media, which can create a divide between the users who are familiar with this, and the people who are used to the content on other platforms.
This follows on from the tweet that went viral in early July, showcasing one of the other members of the account, Jovi Bosch, wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and claiming to “debunk” systematic racism.
BLM failed to consider pic.twitter.com/lO2bKRgnu8
— Kayla (@kobcritic_) July 7, 2020
Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Bosch said “We were shocked by the amount of people who took a screenshot or [shared the video] to Twitter or Instagram without looking at any of the other posts.” One of their concerns was the “constant thread of toxic behaviour and ‘cancel culture’ coming from the Left”, making it difficult for people to understand the actual points that the videos were bringing to light through the veil of satire.
As their posts gained traction and viewership from the Right, Bosch said that the group “expressed some concern for the immediate intellectual fetishization of the POC in the group,” and that the Republican viewers didn’t seem to care how outrageous their claims were, only that they were getting support from people of colour.
However, through all the drama, the account has also received a large amount of support from people who understood that the humour was satirical.
There’s an account on TikTok called pocrepublicans and it’s satire but I love commenting on the videos to play into the satire pic.twitter.com/myfheYqJOf
— Dylan Stucki (@dillydingdong3) July 10, 2020
To avoid further confusion, “We have since [made private] all videos we’ve made that haven’t been blatant satire,” Ma stated, speaking to BuzzFeed News.
Do you think ‘cancel culture’ has gone too far?
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