Trump campaign scraps online sign-ups after Tulsa rally fiasco as TikTok teens vow to keep trolling events
President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign has abandoned online sign-ups for his next rally in Arizona, days after they were spammed with fake entries by TikTok teenagers to his Tulsa rally. The campaign on Monday, June 22, removed its online form for Trump's June 23 event and instead asked the president's supporters to just show up at his Students For Trump rally.
The Trump campaign, last week, had stated that the president's Tulsa rally at Bank of Oklahoma Center had received over a million requests for tickets. However, the coverage of the event showed that an area meant for overflow was largely empty, and there were thousands of empty seats inside the arena too. According to the Tulsa Fire Department, the turnout at the event was just under 6,200 people, less than half the venue's capacity.
The campaign reportedly admitted that at least 300,000 of the million were fake entries after teenagers who had no intention of attending the event booked the seats in an attempt to troll the campaign. The president's campaign, on June 11, had tweeted urging people to use their phones to register for free tickets for the Tulsa rally. Reports state that K-pop fans shared the information with their groups and urged the followers to get the tickets and not show up for the rally. The plan quickly spread and TikTok users also followed the lead of K-pop fans, with a 51-year-old woman reportedly leading part of the charge on TikTok, according to CNN. She posted the video, asking people to "reserve tickets now and leave him standing alone there on the stage." The TikTok users have also vowed to continue trolling the president's campaign.
Shortly after the Trump campaign abandoned its online sign-ups, marketing and data experts stated that the move is a sign that the spamming has continued and could have a lasting effect on the Republican's campaign ahead of 2020 presidential elections. Experts said that the teenagers could cost the campaign massive amounts in donations as instead of loyal Trump rally attendees, the campaign could get a database with fake accounts affecting its pleas for donations.
Co-founder of social media marketing firm Viral Nation, Joe Gagliese, in a statement to the Daily Mail, said: "It's a serious problem. When you have an influx of a million people like that and they turn out to be fraudulent you have to figure out how you sift through to find the 25,000 or whatever number of genuine interest. Breaking down a million data points to find who is an authentic follower in that scenario would be very difficult. The other option would be to send adverts to all of them, and then you're paying to access people who you know obviously don't support you which is a waste of money."
The Trump campaign, ever since the Tulsa rally debacle, has, however, rubbished the idea that they were "pranked" by youngsters, with the campaign's director of communications, Tim Murtaugh, tweeting: "Trolls thinking they hacked rally tix don’t know how this works. Lame trick tried many times. We weed out bogus RSVPs with fake phone #s." Murtaugh, instead, said that the "real factor" why the participation in Trump's rally was so less was because of the "media-stoked fear" of the coronavirus pandemic.