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| - On Nov. 3, 2024, a TikTok user posted (archived) a video labeled "Salem Virginia" that purported to show a massive crowd at a Donald Trump rally in Salem, Virginia. The video's audio consisted of what seemed to be a crowd chanting "We want Trump" over Darude's 1999 dance hit "Sandstorm."
Also on Nov. 3, the video spread to X, where a post (archived) featuring a cropped version of the same video — watermarked to credit the TikTok user who shared the above video — had received around 1,200 shares and 4,400 likes as of this writing.
Although neither post mentioned when the video was allegedly filmed, Trump held a rally in Salem, Virginia, on Nov. 2, 2024, three days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. According to reporting from local FOX affiliate WFXR, that rally drew more than 7,000 attendees.
However, as multiple users pointed out in replies to the X post, the video in question did not authentically show the crowd at Trump's Nov. 2 rally in Salem. Instead, it consisted of edited and misleadingly labeled footage of pop star Chappell Roan's Oct. 6, 2024, performance at the Austin City Limits music festival in Austin, Texas.
The original video, which the official Austin City Limits account, @aclmusicfestival, posted (archived) to TikTok on Oct. 14, 2024, showed the crowd singing along as Roan performed her song "Pink Pony Club." That video is embedded below.
@aclmusicfestival Chappell City Limits 💗 #chappellroan #aclfestival #pinkponyclub #austintx ♬ original sound - ACL Music Festival
In the collage embedded below, a frame from the first second of the "Salem Virginia" video can be seen on the left. A frame from the 00:28 time-stamp of the Austin City Limits video of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club" performance, cropped to approximate the scale of the "Salem Virginia" video, is on the right.
(TikTok user @rhinomor21/Austin City Limits)
We've reached out to the TikTok user who posted the "Salem Virginia" video on Nov. 3 to ask whether he personally created the edited video, and will update this story if we receive a response.
In summary, the "Salem Virginia" consisted of footage of Chappell Roan performing at the Austin City Limits music festival, with the original audio replaced by a crowd chanting "We want Trump" over dance music. The video also circulated on social media without a disclaimer that it did not authentically show a Trump rally. In other words, the video was both digitally edited and mislabeled in order to misrepresent reality. As a result, we have rated this claim as fake.
We've previously investigated similar rumors about the numbers of attendees at political rallies, such as the claim that a photo shared online in late October 2024 showed a massive crowd gathered at a Trump rally in Woodstock, New York.
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