Sal Vulcano, a popular improvisational comedian, actor and producer with Staten Island roots — who starred in the hit show “Impractical Jokers” with three fellow Staten Island natives — made headlines this week for a TikTok mishap, according to Buzzfeed.
Vulcano sparked backlash after a post promoting his upcoming Everything’s Fine Tour was uploaded to his TikTok page, the outlet said.
The post featured offensive audio from Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who is known for sharing racist, antisemitic, and other problematic rhetoric and has been deemed an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the audio, Fuentes makes stereotypical comments about Jewish people, Black people, and women, repeatedly using the N-word and an expletive to describe women. “It is what it is,” he says in the audio.
According to Buzzfeed, Vulcano denied allegations of racism from TikTokers who believed he purposefully used the offensive audio.
He claimed that it was the a mistake, caused by TikTok assigning a random audio to the upload.
“My social media team posted my tour poster across all my social platforms,” he said in a follow-up post on the platform. Sal explained that when his team initially added the tour dates to TikTok, they did so without audio.
“I found out today, when I was alerted of this post, that TikTok will assign their own trending audio to your posts even if you don’t post any audio.”
Vulcano claimed the audio was trending and wound up being automatically assigned to his video.
“Which is unfortunate,” he added. “At first, I thought I was hacked, but no. No, not at all. I don’t know why they will allow something like that to trend and then actually assign it to people’s videos.”
He added that he has since heard similar stories from other users and encouraged viewers to be cautious when posting.
“Obviously, I would never post anything like that,” Sal continued, adding that he plans to follow up with TikTok privately about the matter.