TikTok Users And K-Pop Fans Helped Inflate Attendance For U.S. President Donald Trump's First Political Rally

When U.S. President Donald Trump led his first campaign rally in Tusla, Oklahoma, the attendance was scarce.

In the Midwestern city, the event that was held a day after Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the emancipation of black Americans, was met with controversies, mainly because Trump's choice of the campaign's place and time.

Amid 'COVID-19' coronavirus, which U.S. tops the world with the most amount of people infected with the disease, health authorities warned anyone against holding events that can draw many people.

The same goes to Trump, who had six of his campaign members working at the rally tested positive for the coronavirus. What's more, campaign rally can attract too many people without face masks, packed in one place indoor.

But the President boasted that there had been nearly a million ticket requested for his big event, which insisted him to hold the event.

Trump's campaign said the entry was "first-come-first-serve", and that no one was issued an actual ticket.

When the time came, officials reported that a little more than 6,000 tickets have been scanned. Thousands more of the seats in the 20,000-capacity BOK Center, many of them in the upper deck of the venue, were empty.

The campaign team blamed the disappointing crowd at the rally on protesters to have created a hostile atmosphere and blocking supporters from getting into the arena.

The Black Lives Matter movement, resuscitated by George Floyd’s murder by a white policeman, has raised sensitivities surrounding white violence against black people in America, and Tulsa is home to one of U.S.' most violent of such incidents.

While there were some matches and scuffles outside the event between Black Lives Matter demonstrators and some Trump supporters, but reporters noted that there were only few protests happened outside the venue. They didn't spot many people turning from the event either.

What really happened here, according to several news report, was thousands of TikTok users posted videos and tweets to encourage their followers to register for free tickers for the event, but with no intention of going.

Hundreds if not thousands of creators posted instructions on how to reserve tickets, including how to create fake email addresses and fake phone numbers, to ensure that the stadium would be nearly empty.

Many of the users then deleted their posts to hide their plans.

“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said YouTuber Elijah Daniel to the NYT.

“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.”

This illustrates the power of social media, where people can make impacts on anything, including politics, even if many of the people are still not old enough to vote.

“You are warriors, thank you,” Trump said to his audience at the event, after cancelling an earlier speech at an outdoor event.

“We had some very bad people outside, we had some very bad people outside, they were doing some bad things,” he said of protesters outside the arena.

While the event continued to hold, the empty seats left Trump's campaign disappointed.

"Leftists always fool themselves into thinking they're being clever. Registering for a rally only means you've RSVPed with a cellphone number," said Trump's campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, in a statement to Reuters News Agency. "But we thank them for their contact information."

Brad Parscale, the chairman of Trump’s re-election campaign, downplayed social media impact. This attracted a response from Democrats' New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

"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," she tweeted on Saturday.

"KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too."

While it’s difficult to prove whether the fake reservations by users of social media actually caused any genuine Trump supporters to lose seats, figures have attributed the low turnout to the campaign.

Donald Trump's rally campaign, according to his advisors, was a way to rejuvenate his base and demonstrate support. Polls however, suggested that Trump is actually trailing behond his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

As for Oklahoma, the state in the South Central region of the U.S. reported a surge in new coronavirus cases in recent days, further boosting the total number in the country.

More than 120,000 Americans have died from the disease, which Trump at the rally called “kung flu”.

Trump has also been criticized by China and Asian-American groups, and accused of xenophobia after referring to the virus as the “China virus”.