Protesters Claim to Have Misled Trump's Birthday Procession by purchasing and not using the tickets
In the heart of Donald Trump's birthday parade on Saturday night, an activist shared a video on Meta's Threads platform boasting over a million views on a TikTok video detailing how to reserve tickets for the event, despite having no intention of attending.
Across various social media platforms, folks have been distributing guidance on how to secure tickets for the rally, despite not planning to attended. This trend has been surfacing in recent days.
As rain and the threat of thunderstorms loomed, the crowd for Trump's parade seemed relatively modest. (Accurately estimating crowd size during an event is infamously challenging.) However, on social media, users buzzed with glee, touting their role – as they did in a similar incident in 2020 – in influencing the rally's attendance.
Matt McCool, the special agent-in-charge for the U.S. Secret Service's Washington, D.C., field office, remarked at a security briefing on Monday, "We're preparing for an enormous turnout - hundreds of thousands of attendees."
A typical response read, "I scored 10 tickets here in Australia. Whoops, never mind, won't be there," while another said, "Europeans couldn't use our tickets here. Solidarity from Scotland!"
In 2020, during Trump's first (unsuccessful) reelection campaign, he launched a rally tour with a significant event scheduled for Juneteenth in Tulsa. Across social media – with kpop stans, a notable group with a massive and organized online following, leading the charge – users called on their followers to get involved, reserving tickets to the rally with the intention of leaving the stadium empty and letting the president down. When the president spoke to a sparsely-filled stadium on his comeback rally, these online youths claimed credit for the lackluster audience (although COVID surges during a pre-vaccine era might have played a significant role as well).
Now, social media users are once again claiming credit for a subdued response to Trump's much publicized birthday party and military parade.
This occurrence lands smack dab in a tricky moment for social media companies, especially TikTok, which remains operational today only because President Trump has opted 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.
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(Insight: Although social media may have played a role in the public discourse surrounding the event, there's no concrete evidence to suggest that social media directly affected attendance, or that TikTok had a unique impact on this particular incident.)
On TikTok, users have been sharing guidance on reserving tickets for Trump's rally, despite not planning to attend, a trend that mirrors a similar incident in 2020 when users claimed credit for a sparsely-attended rally by influencing ticket reservations. Meanwhile, social media companies find themselves in a tricky situation, particularly TikTok, with investigations by the FBI and DOJ into ByteDance's use of the platform to spy on journalists.
