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charli-damelio.jpg

Briefly Explained: Why Did TikTok Star Charli D'Amelio Lose 1 Million Followers in 24 Hours?

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | November 20, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | November 20, 2020 |

charli-damelio.jpg

This is Charli D’Amelio.

Charli D’Amelio is 16 years old. She is a huge TikTok star, where she had 95 million followers, as of Tuesday. D’Amelio’s TikTok videos consist almost entirely of her performing short TikTok dances and behaving like a 16-year-old. This video, with her sister, is fairly representative.

Meanwhile, The D’Amelio Family — as part of an extended effort to commodify their children — recently started a YouTube channel. On it, they hosted a “Dinner with the D’Amelios” and invited controversial YouTube star, James Charles. It’s a 16-minute video. There are two moments that ignited controversy.

In the first, Charli’s sister reacted rudely to the snails that their personal chef put in their paella. She gagged, and then puked. Moreover, rather than eat the snails, Charli asked for dino nuggets.

In the other moment, Charli bemoaned the fact that she only had 95 million followers on her year anniversary of her reaching 1 million followers, when she would have preferred to have 100 million followers.

The backlash among those who spend too many hours a day playing Roblox was swift. Charli lost a million followers in 24 hours. Among those complaining was a much older social media star, Trisha Paytas, who is about 30. She complained about the way that Charli behaved in the video, and Charli responded with a tearful video in which she called out Paytas for being rude.

Subsequently, Trish because the subject of so much backlash that she had to apologize for trying to “cancel” Charli.

Half of those invested in this saga are demanding that D’Amelio be canceled, while the other half are bemoaning the fact that old people (like, 30 years old!) are trying to get a teenager canceled. In the meantime, after losing a million followers in 24 hours — or what is essentially a rounding error — Charli is now up to 98.6 million TikTok followers, which is three million more followers than she had before she lost 1 million followers.

tl;dr: It’s bizarre to consider that — given everything else going on in the country right now (an attempted coup! a raging pandemic!) — there is also a completely separate reality where people are arguing over whether it’s OK to judge a privileged teenager with a personal chef and 100 million TikTok followers.



Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here, follow him on Twitter, or listen to his weekly TV podcast, Podjiba.


Header Image Source: Instagram