Did singer Bruce Springsteen cancel his "Atlantic City Summer Concert Series" over low ticket sales after "blowback" over his on-stage comments about President Trump? No, that's not true: That claim originated on a satirical Facebook page and no such concert series ever existed. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The first copy of the viral meme making the claim showed up in a Facebook post (archived here) published by "America's Last Line of Defense" on May 24, 2025. It opened:
Springsteen really kneecapped himself with his comments.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon May 26 12:07:43 2025 UTC)
The text in the meme read:
Bruce Springsteen is canceling his Atlantic City Summer Concert Series for the first time in 25 years due to low ticket sales.
"The blowback over his comments on stage in Europe has been unrelenting and fierce."
However a Google search for pages containing the phrase "Atlantic City Summer Concert" and "Bruce Springsteen" that were online before May 1st, 2025 revealed no results (archived here) indicating there never was any such "concert series".
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
Blair's websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustrations. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
