A supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump in the upper decks of the BOK Center, the Tulsa, Okla., arena where Mr. Trump held a re-election campaign rally on Saturday.
Photo: Leah Millis/ReutersPresident Trump’s smaller-than-expected crowd at his campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., Saturday has led TikTok users to say that their videos helped drive down attendance.
Thousands of teens on TikTok shared videos encouraging people to reserve tickets for Mr. Trump’s rally but not attend, in an attempt to protest the time and place of the rally on Juneteenth near the site of a 1921 massacre of people in an area known as Black Wall Street.
“I thought it was a wonderful idea because it’s a small way of protesting that won’t cause any violence,” said Stephanie Yu, a 16-year-old from Collegeville, Pa. She said she reserved two tickets to the rally with no intent of going.
The Trump campaign played down the effect the requests to reserve tickets for the rally had on the turnout, saying that no one who wanted a ticket was deprived of one. About 6,200 people attended the rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center, Tulsa officials said Sunday.
Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were also supposed to speak to an overflow group outside the arena, but that was canceled as the crowd dwindled. Trump campaign representatives presented their own attendance figures Sunday, with spokesman Tim Murtaugh writing on Twitter that “12,000 people made it’’ past protesters and metal detectors.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted on June 15 there were more than 1 million ticket requests for Saturday’s event.
Mr. Parscale was aware Saturday afternoon that the crowd was going to be smaller than predicted, according to a person familiar with the events.
“What makes this lame attempt at hacking our events even more foolish is the fact that every rally is general admission—entry is on a first-come-first-served basis and prior registration is not required,” said Mr. Parscale in a statement Sunday. Mr. Murtaugh declined to comment when asked if the incident would affect the campaign’s social-media strategy.
Representatives for TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Chinese company ByteDance Ltd. launched TikTok internationally about three years ago with a lighthearted approach to content, including promoting videos with dancing teens and lip-syncing popular songs. But the response to Mr. Trump’s rally shows users are finding increasingly creative ways to organize politically on TikTok. In the first three months of 2020, TikTok racked up more than 315 million downloads, the most of any app in a single quarter, according to research firm Sensor Tower.
Mary Jo Laupp, a 51-year-old musician from Iowa, was playing with her granddaughter on Saturday when several people reached out to her about the number of empty seats at the rally, she said.
Ms. Laupp on June 11 had posted a TikTok video—which she said has been viewed more than 2 million times and shared more than 137,000 times—to encourage viewers to reserve rally tickets. Seven hours after posting her video, she said she realized teens had shared her video widely on TikTok and Snapchat. Soon after, Korean music fans, known as K-Pop stans, also joined the cause, pushing the message on Twitter. Hashtags such as #EmptySeats and #TulsaFlop were shared with videos.
Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital free-speech advocacy group, described the action taken by Ms. Laupp and others as “culture jamming,” and said in the past decade it has become a favored tactic for groups like Anonymous on social media.
This evolution, say Ms. York and other political observers, isn’t unusual: activists have used social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter for at least a decade to organize movements.
“The new part is the involvement of global youth via TikTok,” Ms. York said.
—Liza Lin and Alex Leary contributed to this article.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com
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