Cartel TikTok: Narcos post guns, drugs and boat chase videos

New York, Nov 29 : If you are fascinated by the narco TV series on streaming platforms like Netflix, read on as the drug cartels have now gone live on social media and the Chinese short-video making platform TikTok is their new destination.
Called Cartel TikTok, various drug mafia from Mexico have flooded TikTok with videos and photos of tiger cubs and semi-automatic weapons, piles of cash and armoured cars, fields of poppies watered and the sound of ballads, glorifying Mexican drug cartel culture, reports The New York Times.
“This is the world of Cartel TikTok, a genre of videos depicting drug trafficking groups and their activities that is racking up hundreds of thousands of views on the popular social media platform,” the report said on Saturday.
“It’s narco-marketing. The cartels use these kinds of platforms for publicity, but of course it is hedonistic publicity,” Alejandra Leon Olvera, an anthropologist at Spain’s University of Murcia, was quoted as saying.
A high-speed boat chase video on TikTok, posted by the Mexican cartel, went viral in the US this month.
“Did the cartels just roll out their TikTok marketing strategy?” asked one user in a video viewed some 490,000 times. “Is the coronavirus affecting y’all’s sales?”