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It had been over a 100 days since the president could host a rally due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Despite precaution from health officials, President Donald Trump's campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
However it failed to happen, and teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they are to blame.
Brad Parscale, the chairman of the president's re-election campaign, posted early last week that the campaign had recieved more than a million requests.
However once it came to the actual event, reporters saw that attendance was much lower than anticipated. The campaign was even forced to cancel the events outside because there was no overflow of crowds.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, also blamed the protestors outside who prevented supporters from attending.
But reporters present said there were few protests. According to a spokesman for the Tulsa Fire Department on Sunday, the fire marshal counted 6,200 scanned tickets of attendees. (That number would not include staff, media or those in box suites.)
So why the massive confusion on attendance? You can thank TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music. They are claiming that they registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets to the president's rally as a prank.
After the Trump campaign posted the details about their Tulsa rally, K-pop fan accounts started spreading the information with their followers encouraging them to register and then now show up.
This trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views encouraged viewers to do the same thing.
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 the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the social media campaign. “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”
Most users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to keep their plan secret and stop it from spreading into the mainstream internet. “The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn’t want the Trump campaign to catch wind,” Daniel said. “These kids are smart and they thought of everything.”
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