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Donald Trump and Complete Series Archiveshis campaign expected gigantic crowds at his latest rally in Tulsa, Okla., so much so that outdoor "overflow" activities were planned. The rows upon rows of empty blue venue seats on Saturday night had to be a let down.

The week before the rally, the president's re-election campaign chairman, Brad Parscale, tweeted that more than one million tickets had been requested for the rally. But on Saturday, Trump supporters didn't even manage to fill the 19,000 seats in the Bank of Oklahoma Center, let alone the large area outside that was reserved for an overflow crowd.

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There are several reasons why Trump's attendance might have been lower than expected. For one thing, he held the rally during a global pandemic and made no serious push for attendees to wear masks or socially distance. (In fact, Trump has turned the act of wearing a mask, or not, into a political statement.)

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Some people may have backed out due to concerns for their health and safety, or perhaps a few tickets were reserved by people who were no longer able to attend after Trump changed the date. But another explanation for the high number of tickets requested is simply that Trump and his campaign got trolled. Hard.

Reports have been circulating that say an online movementwas at least partially responsible for all those inflated claims of a big turnout. Apparently, after Trump's campaign tweetedto let followers know that they could register for free tickets for the rally using their phones, many people registered without any intention of attending. TikTok teens and K-Pop fans reportedly spearheaded the prank in an effort to stick it to Trump, but it spread across social media platforms and wound up getting people of all ages on board.

SEE ALSO: 10 mind-boggling and unhinged moments from Trump's Tulsa rally

As the New York Timesstated, once Trump's campaign put out a call for ticket reservations, "K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show." But the prank quickly spread to TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.

On Instagram, accounts such as @she.hicks85, which has 187,000 followers, began posting instructions on how to make the Trump campaign prep for a false attendance count. "The tickets are free. You can get 2 at a time. You have to use a real phn number bc they send a verification code," the caption read. "Listen, idgaf if all we do is embarrass or inconvenience this man make him do like he always does and hire some mfs to sit in that bitch. FUCK HIM."

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Another shot of some empty seats. Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP via Getty Images

After photos of the empty arena seats spread online, @she.hicks85 shared a screenshot of the original posts's analytics.

"The numbers don't lie baby, y'all was putting in that work! Thanks for participating in my petty experiment," the Instagram user wrote alongside a screenshot that showed the call to action had reached nearly 50,000 people.

On TikTok, a similar call to reserve tickets was spreading, and though many teens took part in the prank, so did older app users like 51-year-old Mary Jo Laupp, aka #TikTokGrandma. Laupp told her 12,000 TikTok followers how they could reserve tickets to Trump's rally to "make sure there are empty seats" in the venue.

While the prank didn't take tickets away from actual Trump supporters – seats were empty simply because the turnout was low – the whole point was to raise the campaign's expectations surrounding interest in the event. By that mark, the efforts of social media users were a clear success, though Trump's campaign obviously isn't about to admit that they got trolled.

"Leftists always fool themselves into thinking they're being clever," Trump campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said in a statement on Sunday. "Registering for a rally only means you've RSVPed with a cell phone number. Every rally is general admission and entry is first-come-first served. But we thank them for their contact information."

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The funny thing about that statement is how Murtaugh completely misses the point of the actually very cleverprank. The people who jokingly registered for Trump's rally were never trying to get guaranteed entry. They simply wanted to falsely raise Trump's crowd size expectations in an effort to hit him where he seems to hurt most, his ego.

The idea was simply to get Trump to think that one million people wanted in on this rally, then have him show up to a significantly smaller crowd. It was a largely low-effort, extremely harmless prank, but knowing that since his inauguration dayTrump has made zero effort to conceal his absurd obsession with crowd size, people assumed it would upset him.

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Though Trump has yet to address reports that people purposefully flooded his ticket requests with no intention of attending his rally, many — including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Steve Schmidt, a political strategist who worked for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain — are celebrating the efforts behind the prank.