Did TikTok teens, K-Pop fans punk Trump’s comeback rally?

OAKLAND, Calif. – Did teens, TikTok users and Korean pop music fans troll the president of the United States?

For more than a week before Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday night, these tech-savvy groups opposing the president mobilized to reserve tickets for the rally they had no intention of attending. While it’s not likely that 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.

“My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens,” tweeted veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt on Saturday. The tweet drew many responses from others whose kids or who themselves said they did the same.

In a statement, the Trump campaign blamed “fake news media” for “warning people away from the rally” due to COVID-19 and protests against racial injustice around the country.

“Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don’t know what they’re talking about or how our rallies work,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale wrote. “Reporters who wrote gleefully about TikTok and K-Pop fans – without contacting the campaign for comment – behaved unprofessionally and were willing dupes to the charade.”

Inside the 19,000-seat BOK Center on Saturday, numerous seats were empty. The Tulsa Fire Department said the city fire marshal’s office reported fewer than 6,200 in the arena.

The rally, which was broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

Social media users who’ve followed recent events might not be surprised by the way young people (and some older folks) mobilized to troll the president. They did it not just on TikTok but on Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook. K-pop fans – who have a massive, coordinated online community – have become an unexpected ally to American Black Lives Matter protesters.

As Parscale himself pointed out in a June 14 tweet, though, the ticket signups were not simply about getting bodies to the rally. He called it the “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x” – meaning the hundreds of thousands emails and phone numbers the campaign now has in its possession to use for microtargeting advertisements and reach potential voters.

“No matter who signs up or if they go to a rally, Trump gets data to train retargeting on Facebook. FB’s system will use that data in ways that have nothing to do with Trump,” tweeted Georgia Tech communications professor Ian Bogost. “Might these fake’ signups mess up the Trump team’s targeting data? Maybe it could, to some extent.

“But the entire system is so vast and incomprehensible, we’ll never really know.”