A Trump supporter sits alone in the upper seating areas of the BOK center in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday.
Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday did not produce the large amount he had promised, and TikTok users and K-Pop fans said they had helped reduce participation by adding thousands of tickets reserved online so as not to participate.
Trump’s re-election campaign received over 1 million requests for rally tickets on Monday, according to campaign chairman Brad Parscale’s tweet, but reporters at the rally venue on Saturday found that attendance at the 19,000-seat BOK Center was below expectations.
As others report, participation here in Tulsa appears to be far below the campaign’s expectations. Here is the ground floor of the arena, currently pic.twitter.com/EASfSHL5nN
– Steadman ™ (@AsteadWesley), June 20, 2020
After Trump’s official Twitter account invited supporters to request tickets for the event on June 11, K-Pop fan accounts encouraged their followers to register for the event and then not participate. TikTok videos with millions of views encouraged viewers to do the same, CNN reported Tuesday.
“Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally and can’t go,” joked one in a TikTok that was released on June 15.
Parscale tweeted that “radical demonstrators” “disrupted” participation, Twitter users declared Saturday’s efforts a political victory.
“Actually, you were just rocked by teenagers on TikTok,” rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York democrat, tweeted in response to Parscale’s tweet.
In fact, you’ve just been rocked to TikTok by teenagers who flooded the Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations and made you think that a million people wanted your white Supremacist microphone to be open enough to enter an arena during COVID to pack
Call Zoomers. You make me so proud. ☺️ https://t.co/jGrp5bSZ9T
– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC), June 21, 2020
Republican political strategist Steve Schmidt added: “My 16-year-old daughter and friends in Park City, Utah have hundreds of tickets. They were rolled by America’s teenagers.
TikTok is a social media app in which users, mostly teenagers and young adults, publish videos up to 15 seconds long that are often synced with music. The app belongs to the Chinese company ByteDance, currently the most valuable startup in the world.
The app gained popularity and was recorded in the first quarter of the year more than 2 billion times In April, the analysis company Sensor Tower reported from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
TikTok and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
K-Pop fans, who are known for their wide online networks, previously used their active presence to disrupt racist hashtags that arose during the protests against Black Lives Matter. Fans flooded these hashtags with videos of their favorite groups and drowned out the racist messages.