TikTok Teens Claim They Messed With Trump Rally

Teen TikTok users and K-pop fans are apparently patting themselves on the back for what they claim was a successful prank related to the attendance at President Trump's Tulsa rally on Saturday. While Trump's re-election campaign trumpeted last Monday that it had received more than 1 million ticket requests for the event, the 19,000-seat stadium ended up going unfilled; the Tulsa World estimates the audience numbered about 10,000 people. The New York Times reports on what TikTok users and fans of Korean pop claim they did: Following a June 11 tweet from @TeamTrump instructing fans on how to register for free tickets to the rally, K-pop lovers started retweeting the info with a call to register but fail to show. On TikTok, videos popped up instructing teens to do the same, and those videos reportedly got millions of views.

Bloomberg reports that many of the TikTok videos took the same format: Teens danced in front of screenshots about the Tulsa registration while the song "Macarena" played. No word from TikTok on the claim, but a 26-year-old who says he took part told the Times that TikTok users knew to delete their videos after 24 hours or so, in order to keep the Trump campaign from uncovering what was going on. And it apparently wasn't just teens involved. A 51-year-old Iowa woman says she posted a TikTok video pushing the false registrations late on June 11 and woke up to see her video had been watched more than 2 million times; she figures it led to a minimum of 17,000 prank registrations. GOP strategist Steve Schmidt tweeted this on Saturday: "My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America's teens." (AOC weighed in on the prank, too.)