Did teens, TikTok users and Korean pop music fans troll the president of the United States?
For more than a week before Donald Trumps first campaign rally in Tulsa on Saturday night, these tech-savvy groups opposing the president mobilized to reserve tickets for the rally they had no intention of attending. While its not likely that they were responsible for the low turnout, their antics may have inflated the campaigns expectations for attendance numbers that lead to Saturdays disappointing show.
My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by Americas teens, tweeted veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt on Saturday. The tweet garnered more than 100,000 likes and many responses from others whose kids or who themselves said they did the same.
Reached by telephone Sunday, Schmidt called the rally an unmitigated disaster days after Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale tweeted that more than a million people requested tickets for the rally through Trumps campaign website.
Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said the turnout was a sign of weakening voter support. Donald Trump has abdicated leadership and it is no surprise that his supporters have responded by abandoning him, he said.
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, dont know what theyre talking about or how our rallies work, 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.
On midday Sunday, it was possible to sign up for a livestream a Tulsa Team Trump on Tour event later in the day through Trump website. It asked for a name, email address and a phone number. There was no age verification in the signup process, though the site required a pin to verify phone numbers.
Inside the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa Saturday, when Trump thundered that the silent majority is stronger than ever before, numerous seats were empty. Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said the city fire marshals office reported a crowd of just less than 6,200 in the arena.
City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa but that never materialized. That said the rally, which was broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.
Social media users whove 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 and a cutting sense of humor have become an unexpected ally to American Black Lives Matter protesters.
In recent weeks, theyve been re-purposing their usual platforms and hashtags from boosting their favorite stars to backing the Black Lives Matter movement. They flooded right-wing hashtags such as white lives matterand police apps with short video clips and memes of their K-pop stars. Many of the early social media messages urging people to sign up for tickets brought up the fact that the rally had originally been scheduled for Friday, June 19. The date is known as Juneteenth because it marks the end of slavery in the United States. Tulsa, the location for the rally, was the scene in 1921 of one of the most severe white-on-black attacks in American history.
Schmidt said he was not surprised. Todays teens, after all, grew up with phones and have absolutely mastered them. They are also the first generation to have remote Zoom classes and have a subversive sense of humor, having come of age in a world of online trolls and memes. Most of all, they are aware of what is happening around them, he said.
Like salmon in the river they participate politically through the methods and means of their lives, Schmidt added.
That said, the original idea for the mass ticket troll may have come not from a teen but an Iowa grandma. The politics site Iowa Starting Line found that a TikTok video posted on June 11 by Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old grandmother from Fort Dodge, Iowa, suggesting that people book free tickets make sure there are empty seats. Laupps video, which also tells viewers how to stop receiving texts from the Trump campaign after they provide their phone number (simply text STOP), has had more than 700,000 likes. It was also possible to sign up for the rally using a fake or temporary phone number from Google Voice, for instance.
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.
Sure, its possible that many of the emails are fake and that the ticket holders have no intention of voting for Trump in November. But while its possible that this bad data might prove useless or even hurt the Trump campaign in some way, experts say there is one clear beneficiary in the end, and that is Facebook. Thats due to the complex, murky ways in which Trumps political advertising machine is tied up with the social media giant. Facebook wants data on people, and whether that is good or bad it will be used to train its systems.
No matter who signs up or if they go to a rally, Trump gets data to train retargeting on Facebook. FBs 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 teams targeting data? Maybe it could, to some extent. But the entire system is so vast and incomprehensible, well never really know.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
Yeah, a bunch of tiktok goofy teens sabotaged a Trump campaign event. Keep believing that, because there is no possibility that Trump’s campaign could fall short of its goals.