Astroworld Tragedy Fuels A New Satanic Panic On TikTok

Astroworld Tragedy Fuels A New Satanic Panic On TikTok

Travis Scott performs during 2021 Astroworld Festival at NRG Park on November 05, 2021 in Houston, ... [+] Texas. (Photo by Erika Goldring/WireImage) The terrible tragedy at Travis Scott's Astroworld concert, which resulted in the death of 8 concertgoers, has sparked a wave of lawsuits and questions regarding the safety of the event. Scott himself has come under fire, as critics point to his history of encouraging crowd violence and chaos during his shows (a video clip from a previous concert shows Scott explicitly telling his fans to attack a teenager who stole his shoe while he was crowd-surfing). In the face of senseless tragedy, some have turned away from the mundanity of crowd mismanagement and focused their attention on symbolism, attempting to find hidden meaning in decoration, set design, and even the marketing of Astroworld. On TikTok and Twitter, conspiracy theorists are pointing to the Satanic/Illuminati-themed aesthetic of the concert, sparking baseless speculations involving ritualistic blood sacrifice (an all-too-familiar narrative in our QAnon-poisoned social media platforms). Tiktok users claiming to have attended the festival repeatedly use words like "demonic" and "Satanic" to describe the horror of the event, with other users taking those descriptions literally. The fact that the