Photographs and video on YouTube showing long lines of buses were shared with the untrue claim that they were used to ship paid anti-Trump protesters to various cities.
Although the photographs , video are real, and protests did take place in Austin on 9 November 2016, these two things were not connected. According to Austin station KTBC, the buses seen here were lined up outside of the Austin Convention Center, where the Tableau Conference, which had about 11,000 attendees, was taking place:
The charter buses were lined up along 5th Street near Waller in Downtown, the closest point to the rally would’ve been Congress Avenue which is about a mile away. The protest started on the West Mall on the UT campus about 3 miles away. Down the street about 1/2 mile is Austin Convention Center. Local businesses in the area said they’ve seen charter buses at the location prior to the election.
Carol Scott-Duke, works in area, “We are definitely used to events happening around here with buses due to the convention center right over here and there’s event centers over here,” she said.
One of those events happening at the time of the charter bus Twitter post at the convention center is the Tableau Convention.
Kate Lyons is from Portland, Oregon and was one [of those] attending the convention.
“It’s growing every year, five years ago it started with 250 people, now it was 13,000 attendees in person.” She said they have been using charter buses for the event.
“They sold out all the hotels downtown and they ended having to send people to hotels that were outside the radius of the conference and sent buses out to ship people around for that. We saw them from day one which was Monday,” she said.
A similar rumor, this time involving Chicago, was circulated after the disreputable web site Zero Hedge published a video on 13 November 2016 showing a large number of buses parked on a street. The web site provided no evidence that the buses had transported paid protesters, or that the buses had anything at all to do with the protests: