Transcript:

Speaker 1: Whatever you think about TikTok, one thing is certain. More than one-third of Americans, one-third of the country, already used the app, and its users have an enormous amount of political power at their fingertips. Remember back in 2020 when Donald Trump decided to hold a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was the site of a historic massacre of Black Americans, and he decided to hold that rally during the weekend of the Juneteenth holiday? Trump's campaign boasted that more than 1 million people had requested tickets to the rally. But on the day of the event, turnout was a whole lot lower than that. A massive wave of TikTok users, led by a group of K-pop fans, took credit, and they celebrated their Trump trolling, signing up to attend his rally with no intention of actually showing up.

Speaker 2: Somebody on another TikTok post commented that he was offering two free tickets on his campaign website to go to this rally. So I went and investigated it. It's two free tickets per cell phone number. I recommend all of those of us that want to see this 19,000-seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty — go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there alone on the stage. What do you say?

Speaker 1: Now Trump is running for president again, and TikTok users are back at it. This is TikTok influencer Peter McIndoe. He is most famous for helping to popularise the online joke conspiracy "Birds Aren't Real." Here he is explaining that movement in a local news interview.

Speaker 3: The message of the movement is essentially to spread awareness that from 1959 through 2001, the government mercilessly genocided over 12 billion birds and simultaneously replaced them with surveillance drones in disguise that film us every day as equally as these cameras are filming us right now.

Speaker 1: For the record, birds are very much real. Now, McIndoe has set his sights on a new target: Trump and his right-wing social media platform, Truth Social.

Speaker 4: Okay, we can take over Trump's app Truth Social right now. Here's how. Okay, so the top trending topics only have, like, 100 people talking about them, so this means if only 100 of us make accounts and posts with a new hashtag, it will literally be trending and Trump will see it. So in my opinion, the hashtag we should use is DeSantis 2024. Ron DeSantis, for those who don't know, is his biggest enemy and his main challenger for 2024. Truth Social is Trump's app, and if he thinks that his own base is turning against him on the day of his arrest and switching teams, I think he would actually lose his mind.

Speaker 1: McIndoe posted that video on Tuesday. According to NBC News, by that afternoon, the hashtag DeSantis 2024 had shot its way up to the top spot, having accrued more than 1,500 mentions overnight. As signups flooded Truth Social this week, some online claimed they could no longer join because the app had paused the acceptance process for new accounts. Others speculated the sudden influx of signups could have crashed Truth Social's servers.

There is no word from Trump on all of this as yet, but this latest campaign should serve as a warning to lawmakers looking to change any social media regulations. Mess with TikTok influencers at your own risk.