TikTok, K-Pop fans mess with rally

OAKLAND, California — Did teens, TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music troll the U.S. president? For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in three months on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, these tech-savvy groups mobilized to reserve tickets for an event they had no intention of attending. While it’s unlikely they were responsible for the low turnout, their antics may have inflated the campaign’s expectations for attendance numbers that led to Saturday’s disappointing show.

Inside the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa, Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said the city fire marshal’s office reported a crowd of just less than 6,200 in the arena.

The original idea for the mass ticket troll may have come from an Iowa woman. The politics site Iowa Starting Line found that a TikTok video posted on June 11 by Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old from Fort Dodge, Iowa, suggesting that people book free tickets to “make sure there are empty seats.”

K-Pop fans — who have a massive, co-ordinated online community and a cutting sense of humour — have become an unexpected ally to American Black Lives Matter protesters.

In recent weeks, they’ve been repurposing their usual platforms and hashtags from boosting their favourite stars to backing the Black Lives Matter movement. They flooded rightwing hashtags such as “white lives matter” and police apps with video clips and memes of their K-pop stars.