Viral Tik Tok Star Charli D’Amelio Lost One Million Followers… Out Of Her 99.5 Million Followers
CelebritiesDirt Bag
By now, you’ve probably seen a video of Charli D’Amelio, the Tik Tok influencer whose somewhat formulaic dances done to a variety of popular songs has gained her tens of thousands of followers on the platform. And Charli isn’t the only D’Amelio aspiring to fame. The D’Amelio family—which consists of Charli, her older sister Dixie (a fellow popular TikToker and aspiring singer), and their parents Marc and Heidi—also have a reality television show in the works.
This week, the D’Amelio sisters have been receiving criticism for being “bratty” after comments they made in the first episode of the family’s new YouTube series “Dinner With the D’Amelios,” the premise of which involves the D’Amelios sitting down to (you guessed it!) dinner with a surprise celebrity guest. For the first video, beauty YouTuber James Charles is the mystery guest, and the meal is served by the family’s personal chef Aaron May.
The most cringeworthy part of the video is when May serves the family traditional paella, explaining “it’s actually an omen of good luck and fortune.” In response, Charli jokingly scoffs “liar.” Upon seeing the dish, which has snails in it, the girls start making faces and fake gagging. After tasting a tiny bit of the snail, Dixie runs off to throw up, and Charli jokingly asks if she can have dino nuggets instead. Understandably, some viewers saw the sisters’ responses as disrespectful and ignorant.
(On Wednesday, Dixie posted a TikTok clarifying that she vomits often, even at just the smell of something she doesn’t like, and claiming that her team knew the snail would “get a reaction” out of her, saying “I love [our] chef, and I would never disrespect him in any way.”)
Later in the video, Charli laments not yet quite breaking 100 million TikTok followers, a year after she reached one million followers on the platform. “95 million not enough for you?” James Charles asks. “Well I was just like saying like, even numbers.” Charli responds. While this might just be treated as an off-hand comment by itself, in combination with the paella incident it paints the picture of a couple of pretty entitled teenagers who lack the self-awareness to realize even a fraction of their own privilege.
It’s wild to make death threats towards a teenager for being spoiled. At the same time, it is annoying to watch a wealthy white 16-year-old girl scoff at a plate of food made for her by a private chef just because it looked unfamiliar, ask for dino nuggets instead, and complain that she doesn’t QUITE have 100 million followers—a milestone she is well on her way to achieving. Charli’s comments seem especially tone-deaf with the knowledge that Black TikTok creators like Jalaiah Harmon, who created the viral ‘Regenade’ dance, struggle to even get recognition for the viral trends they create—let alone a hundred million followers or their own chef.
As someone who’s experienced what it’s like to be on the receiving end of just the tiniest fraction of the internet harassment that Charli and Dixie must be dealing with at the moment (don’t anger Drake fans), it can be truly demoralizing and scary, and I can’t fathom what it would be like to deal with that as a 16-year-old. Making death threats over dino nuggets is beyond an overreaction. And at the same time, it’s hard to muster up much sympathy for teenagers essentially being called out for being rude and entitled.
Even if cancel culture were real (spoiler alert: it is not), Charli losing less than 1% of her MASSIVE following wouldn’t remotely qualify her for cancellation. As a person in the public eye, having your behavior criticized and the size of your following shrink after an incident isn’t cancellation—sometimes it’s just consequences. [NY Post]
Last week, Brad Pitt was spotted hand-delivering boxes of groceries in a Los Angeles housing project, working with other volunteers to pass out the food to low-income families in the area.
According to an eyewitness, “there was zero swagger. It wasn’t about glory, you could see he was doing it for self-satisfaction. It really felt like he was in his element.”
A celebrity actually doing something tangibly helpful during the pandemic that’s left countless people struggling to pay rent and afford dinner instead of just singing “Imagine” and complaining about being stuck inside their mansions? Color me genuinely shocked. The bar could literally not be lower, but of course it’s Brad Pitt that exceeds it. [Page Six]