K-pop stans, teens on TikTok may have inflated expected turnout to Trump’s Tulsa rally
Trump’s Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma featured smaller-than-expected crowds, with rows of empty seats at the 19,000-capacity BOK Center despite an expected turnout of nearly a million supporters. A call to action coordinated by teens and young adults on TikTok and K-pop users on Twitter could explain what happened.
After the Trump re-election campaign opened up registration for free tickets to the rally, K-pop fans on Twitter shared information on how to sign up — with directives to obtain tickets, but not attend.
The posts, per the New York Times, were deleted so that “mainstream” social media users wouldn’t catch wind of their sly campaign.
The phenomenon later spread onto TikTok, where scores of users encouraged their followers to do the same.
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Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old woman who has branded herself as the #TikTokGrandma, was one of the first to call for the protests on that platform. In a June 12 TikTok sharing her frustration with a rally taking place on Juneteenth in Tulsa — the rally was moved a day later by Trump’s campaign — she explained how to reserve tickets to the rally.
“Did you know you can make sure there are empty seats at Trump’s rally?” she captioned the video, which has now amassed 706,000 likes on the platform as of Sunday.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised the collective involved in the action, telling Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale “you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok.”
“Shout out to Zoomers,” she said, referring to the largely Gen Z makeup of these groups. “Y’all make me so proud.”
This isn’t the first coordinated action led by K-pop fans, who have largely self-directed movements to shut down white supremacist hashtags on Twitter and overload police department apps requesting videos of protesters nationwide with videos of K-pop performers, which are known colloquially as “fancams.”
Fans of the hugely popular group BTS also matched a $1 million donation by the boy band to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Follow Joshua Bote on Twitter: @joshua_bote
