Oneonta, a town of 7,000 in Alabama, can lay claim to a TikTok account that has 117,000 followers. The driver of the town’s popularity on the wildly popular social media site is Mayor Richard Phillips and his staff. Chinese infiltration it would seem. Political intrigue and all that….
Except that the interest in Oneonta and the doings of its elected officials isn’t political as much as it’s comedic. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Stu Woo, Mayor Phillips and his quirky staffers are in a sense lifelike versions of the characters from fictional Pawnee, Indiana in the late NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation. Their doings (including videos of the Mayor himself dancing on the town’s main drag) have made Oneonta and the town’s political “elites” national, and seemingly international TikTok celebrities.
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