TikTok users and Korean pop music fans were partly pleased to have inflated attendance expectations in a less than full arena at the first political rally of US President Donald Trump in months, which held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Saturday.
Social media users on platforms, including the popular video sharing app, said they had completed free online registration for the rally with no plans to go.
Prior to the event, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale said there had been more than a million requests to participate. However, the 19,000-seat BOK Center arena had many empty seats on Saturday night, and Trump and Vice President Mike Pence canceled speeches in an outside “overflow” area.
Tulsa firefighters counted the crowd at approximately 6,200 people.
Trump’s campaign advisers had viewed the rally as a way to rejuvenate his base and show support when opinion polls showed him to follow his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Oklahoma reported an increase in the number of new cases of coronavirus, and the state health department had warned those planning to attend the event that they were at increased risk of getting the virus.
The Trump campaign said entry was on a “ first come, first served ” basis and that no one had received a real ticket.
“Leftists are always wrong in thinking they are smart. Joining a rally only means that you answered with a cell phone number,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a communicated. “But we thank them for their contact details.”
Parscale said in a statement that the campaign eliminates fake phone numbers and did so with “tens of thousands” at the Tulsa event to calculate possible traffic.
The representative of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, deridedly replied to a Twitter message from Parscale which criticized the media for having discouraged the participants and cited the bad behavior of the demonstrators outside.
“In fact, you were just shaken by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations and made you believe that a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic to be enough to wrap an arena during COVID, “she tweeted on Saturday. “Allies of the KPop, we also see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice,” she added.
CNN reported Tuesday that a TikTok video posted by Mary Jo Laupp, which uses the hashtag #TikTokGrandma, helped lead the charge. The video now has more than 700,000 likes.
Two K-pop fans who spoke to Reuters on Skype and telephone interviews on Sunday said they had each signed up for two spots, without using their real names and numbers.
Raq, a 22-year-old student and Democratic voter from Minnesota who only wanted to be identified by her nickname, said the main reason for her participation was that the rally was in Tulsa, the site of the bloodiest epidemics of racist violence in the world. country against About 100 years ago, black Americans.
“I heard it first from BTS fans, then once I saw that it had arrived at TikTok, I thought, oh yes, it’s going to explode,” he said. she said, referring to a group of popular South Korean boys.
Em, a 17-year-old Kansas student who only wanted to be identified by her username, said she first heard of the effort on TikTok. She said many of the original tweets sharing information about the rally had been deleted.
“I think it was partly the TikTokers and the K-pop fans, but also that people are not as interested in Trump as he thinks,” she said.
K-pop fans have gathered around the Black Lives Matter movement on social media for the past few weeks, taking control of hashtags that opposed the movement and spamming a Dallas Police Department app that was asking for proof of illegal activities during the protests.
On Saturday, there were matches and scuffles outside the event between the 30 Black Lives Matter protesters and Trump supporters waiting to enter.
Reuters reporter said police temporarily closed access doors after protesters arrived at the perimeter of the rally, but state soldiers helped clean up the area and the doors were reopened approximately three hours before the start of the rally.
The Biden campaign denied having played a role in the social media registration effort.
“Donald Trump has abdicated the leadership and it is not surprising that his supporters reacted by abandoning him,” said campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
