The Roll Up: October 21, 2025 

TL;DR:  Opponents of the current administration took to streets, roads and parks across America on Saturday, making their voices heard on the second "No Kings" day of 2025. Organizers and news agencies reported these protests were bigger that the June protests of the same name. Rolli IQ has the social media intelligence to show how much engagement has changed and if the nature of both support and criticism has evolved this time around. Here's what we know:

No Kings 2.0 fell on what turned out to be a beautiful Saturday in most of the country, bringing out around seven million demonstrators in about 2700 locations, according to news reports. As the name suggests, the protests were the second of their kind this year, following the original No Kings rallies held on June 14, both Flag Day in the United States and Donald Trump's 79th birthday. The first iteration of No Kings drew an estimated five million demonstrators in about 2100 locations, again based on news reporting.

The rhetoric leading up to this past weekend's rallies seemed both more abundant and more acrimonious than the first time around. Anti-Trump voices had more to complain about, now nine months into this second Trump administration, while conservative leaders seemed to rally around talking points like calling this a "Hate America" rally and arguing there would be violence from so-called "antifa" activists. 

Using Rolli IQ social media intelligence, it's possible to see the difference both in volume and rhetoric between the first and second No Kings events. Looking at the week leading up to the event through the day after the June protests and comparing it to the same period last week, the most simple search of "No" and "Kings" yields surprisingly similar results. In terms of sheer volume of engagement, No Kings 2.0 slightly edges out the first iteration, though not by the same margin as the difference in crowd size.

Rolli IQ Sentiment Summary for "No" and "Kings" in June 2025

Rolli IQ shows more than nine million engagements with the No Kings term during that week in June, a very healthy number. The sentiment was fairly evenly mixed on socials media then, which is a bit surprising due to the preponderance of posts on right-leaning Twitter/X. 

Rolli IQ AI Summary for "No" and "Kings" in October 2025

Moving forward to October, there is a sizeable increase in the total mentions of the term No Kings, coming in about 45 percent higher than the June mentions. That's on par with the estimated 40 percent increase in participation at the rallies October over June. Total engagement though barely crept up between June and October with fewer than a million more engagements or about a 10 percent increase.

One difference not seen in the numbers is in the change in the nature of the type of comments from June to October. Positive posts are nearly gone by October, replaced with what Rolli IQ recognizes as "irrelevant" comments, meaning they aren't entirely focused on the key words. That change may reflect the right's coordinated attempt to characterize the protests as violent or anti-American, despite the facts not supporting those accusations. It's possible to see the wide range of comments in the Rolli IQ AI text summary of the October analysis below. 

Rolli IQ Sentiment Text Summary for "No" and Kings" in October 2025

Choosing one of those descriptors to search also shows the power of the coordinated efforts on the right to discredit the protests. Using Rolli IQ to search the term "antifa" over both time periods yields very interesting results.

The June search results show a healthy, yet still rather small use of the term "antifa" in social media during the week of the first No Kings rallies. The sentiment is overwhelmingly negative, with those on the right condemning protestors as being "antifa" and anti-American, while those on the left posted negative comments about the use of the term "antifa" and what they say is its misuse by the right.

Rolli IQ Sentiment Summary for "antifa" in June 2025

By the October No Kings rallies, Rolli IQ is producing a very different picture. The number of mentions of "antifa" has nearly doubled while the engagement is up more than 300 percent. The engagement is now almost entirely negative, following the same pattern of the left condemning the use of the term and the right condemning those it calls "antifa." 

Rolli IQ Sentiment Summary for "antifa" in October 2025

The telling difference between the two sides in social media becomes apparent when employing a Rolli IQ Topic Tree analysis of the term "No Kings" versus the term "antifa." The "No Kings" terms were being used mostly by the left, while "antifa" was being used by the right. A fascinating dichotomy appears when looking into claims of violence. Those using the term "No Kings" focused almost exclusively on MAGA violence at peaceful No Kings events, as seen in this Rolli IQ Topic Tree excerpt below.

But if the search uses the keyword "antifa," nearly all of the incidents of violence found in posts talk of alleged violence from the left.

The bottom line is that the analysis using Rolli IQ to look at social media posts about No Kings protests in June and October shows a slight increase in engagement for the second set of protests, though not at the level one might expect. The real difference comes from the coordinated use of the term "antifa" from the right to characterize the protests--which have been reported as nearly completely peaceful--as violent, anti-American events. This shows a stark difference in information available to those who rely on social media to be informed of current events. Depending on the terms a user searches and what the algorithms see as that user's preferences, two very different pictures of the weekend protests will develop.