It’s almost impossible to measure how big of an impact they had, but it appears TikTok users played a major role in embarrassing the Trump campaign by affecting the results of Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
K-pop fans and TikTok users overlap in some ways. Both are generally younger people who, unlike the generations before them, grew up with social media. They have an acute awareness of the world around them as it appears on social media, and that informed perspective has given way to various forms of activism in recent history. Most notably, K-pop fans have leveraged their social media knowledge to support the Black Lives Matter movement by helping to obstruct potentially unconstitutional police action against protesters and by hijacking #WhiteLivesMatter posts on Twitter.
The idea that “Zoomers” impacted Trump’s rally comes from the campaign’s data collection attempts and posts from campaign manager Brad Parscale. The Trump campaign’s greatest strength is arguably its unprecedented use of data collection to micro-target technologically un-savvy voters. To aid those goals, the campaign had a system allowing people to reserve two free tickets to the Tulsa rally provided they registered on its website and gave a phone number (which would have been used to push more campaign ads). Parscale took to Twitter to celebrate the registration numbers, saying “Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x,” resulting in dozens of responses from people, many of whom not old enough to vote, explaining that they’d reserved multiple seats.
Why People Credit TikTok for Sabotaging the Rally
Ultimately, the rally, which had indoor seats for 19,000 attendees and an outdoor overflow stage for thousands more, achieved a crowd size of about 6,000 people. The peculiar thing about this story is no one can honestly explain why. Trump’s campaign and the president himself have both lied about the cause, making statements that were both demonstrably false and in conflict with one another. For example, Trump commented during the rally that attendance was low as a result of “very bad people outside”, referring to protesters allegedly blocking entrances into the event center. After that was disproven several times by live news footage and anecdotal reports, the campaign shifted to statements made on “Fox News Sunday” that the low turnout was a result of people legitimately reserving tickets but being too afraid to attend out of fear of violent protests.
Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID
Shout out to Zoomers. Y’all make me so proud. ☺️ https://t.co/jGrp5bSZ9T
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 21, 2020
These narratives make it easier to believe TikTok and social media are more plausible explanations. One viral post on the platform from user Mary Jo Laupp actively suggested people reserve seats and then cancel the ensuing text messages from the Trump campaign, and it’s been viewed millions of times.
There are hundreds of easy-to-find accounts on Twitter of people saying they’ve reserved dozens or hundreds of tickets. Again, none of these claims are 100% verifiable, but it’s hard to write them off after the boastful statements from Brad Parscale about the record number of registrations for the rally. Considered against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic (Oklahoma’s daily infection rate continues to increase) it’s hard to imagine this rally achieved such impressive sign-up numbers, yet such a small turnout, as a result of Trump supporters simply deciding to stay home at the last minute.
Source: Twitter, @maryjolaupp
Header Image Source: @DHStokyo [Twitter]