In the middle of Donald Trump’s birthday military parade on Saturday evening, an activist posted a video on the Meta platform, Threads, announcing that they had received more than a million views on a TikTok video advertising how to reserve tickets to the Trump parade event.
The activist had no intention of attending the Trump rally, nor did many of the people that saw their video. But they were one of dozens of social media users across platforms who began circulating instructions in recent days for how to reserve tickets to the rally, even if you had no intention of attending it.
On Saturday evening, amidst rain and a threat of thunderstorms, the crowds for Trump’s parade appeared to be modest. (It is notoriously difficult to accurately assess crowd size, especially during the middle of an event.) On social media, though, users were gleeful, taking credit — as they did in a similar incident in 2020 — for impacting the rally’s attendance. “We’re preparing for an enormous turnout — hundreds of thousands of attendees,” Matt McCool, the special agent-in-charge for the U.S. Secret Service’s Washington, D.C., field office, said at a security briefing on Monday.
“I got 10 tickets here in Australia. Whoops, my bad, won’t be there,” wrote one. Said another, “We Europeans couldn’t use our tickets here. Solidarity from Scotland!”
In 2020, at the height of Trump’s first (and failed) reelection campaign, he kicked off a rally tour with a large event planned for Juneteenth in Tulsa. Users across social media — including, notably, kpop stans, who command a large and organized following online — implored their followers to get involved, reserving tickets to the rally with the intent of leaving the stadium open and the president high and dry. When the president did, in fact, speak to a half-empty stadium in his comeback rally, online teens claimed credit for the paltry crowd (although COVID surges in a pre-vaccine era might have done as much or more to explain it).
This incident comes at a particularly tricky moment for social media companies, and for TikTok especially, which is only online today because President Trump has chosen not to enforce a binding law that would ban it from the United States unless its parent company, ByteDance, sells it to a non-Chinese company.
