TikTok teens, K-pop fans say they sank rally
Followers urged to register for Trump event and then not show up
President Donald Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.
Brad Parscale, the chairman of Trump’s reelection campaign, posted on Twitter last Monday that the campaign had fielded more than 1 million ticket requests, but reporters at the event noted that attendance was lower than expected. The campaign also canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated overflow crowd that did not materialize.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said protesters stopped supporters from entering the rally, held at the BOK Center, which has a 19,000-seat capacity. Reporters present said there were few protests.
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for
Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same, as CNN reported Tuesday. “Oh no. I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go,” one woman joked, along with a fake cough, in a TikTok posted June 15.
Thousands of other users posted similar tweets and videos to TikTok that racked
up millions of views. Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the social media campaign.
Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet.
Twitter users Saturday night were quick to declare the social media campaign’s victory.
“Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok,” Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez of New York tweeted in response to Parscale, who had tweeted that “radical protestors” had “interfered” with attendance.
Steve Schmidt, a longtime
Republican strategist, added, “The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump.”
Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-yearold from Fort Dodge, Iowa, said she had been watching Black TikTok users express their frustration about Trump hosting his rally on Juneteenth, the holiday Friday. (The rally was later moved to Saturday.) She “vented” her own anger in a late-night TikTok video June 11 — and provided a call to action.
“I recommend all of those of us that want to see this 19,000-seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there alone on the stage,” Laupp said in the video.
She said she believed that at least 17,000 tickets were accounted for based on comments she received
on her TikTok videos but added that people reaching out to her said tens of thousands more had been reserved.
Erin Hoffman, an 18-year-old from upstate New York, said she heard from a friend on Instagram about the social media campaign. She then spread it herself via her Snapchat story and said friends who saw her post told her they were reserving tickets.
“Trump has been actively trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans in so many ways, and to me, this was the protest I was able to perform,” said Hoffman, who reserved two tickets herself and persuaded one of her parents to nab two more. “He doesn’t deserve the platform he has been given.”
Laupp said that many of the people who shared her video added commentary
encouraging people to procure the tickets with fake names and phone numbers. In the comment section under her own video, TikTok users exchanged advice on how to acquire a Google Voice number or another internet-connected phone line.
“We all know the Trump campaign feeds on data; they are constantly mining these rallies for data,” said Laupp, who worked on several rallies for Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. “Feeding them false data was a bonus. The data they think they have, the data they are collecting from this rally, isn’t accurate.”
K-pop stans have been getting increasingly involved in American politics in recent months. After the Trump campaign solicited messages for the president’s birthday June 8, K-pop stans submitted a stream of prank messages. And earlier in June, when the Dallas Police Department asked citizens to submit videos of suspicious or illegal activity through a dedicated app, K-pop Twitter claimed credit for crashing the app by uploading thousands of “fancam” videos.
They also reclaimed the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag in May by spamming it with endless K-pop videos in hopes to make it harder for white supremacists and sympathizers to find one another and communicate their messaging.
Whether or not the prank to call in false tickets was the reason for the empty upper rafters at Trump’s rally, teenagers online celebrated. On Twitter, several accounts tweeted, “best senior prank ever.”