Charli D’Amelio has lost subscribers for his chef YouTube video. But why?

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This weekend, 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio became the first person to reach 100 million subscribers on TikTok. The week before, many of those millions of followers told her to kill herself because she had acted rude at a dinner party.

Let’s go back for a moment to why Charli and her family are so popular in the first place. Almost exactly a year ago, Charli’s dance videos began to inexplicably go viral on TikTok. There are plenty of theories as to why, although all of them sound a bit like insults: maybe she was pretty but achievable, or a good dancer but not too good, or neither one nor the other didn’t matter because her cute facial expressions did. most of the work anyway.

Either way, it’s clear how she continued to gain fame. In the Atlantic last week, Rachel Monroe’s feature film on the D’Amelios put it this way: “As Charli’s subscribers grew, her popularity acquired a reflective quality; essentially, she’s become a meme that other TikTokers can react to. I don’t understand why Charli’s posts are so popular, followed by backlash videos with #teamcharli and #unproblematicqueen tags. “As the number of questions about why Charli was popular increased,” Monroe explains, “his popularity increased as well.

Controversy is something Charli and her family have tried to avoid over the year since becoming one of America’s most famous teenage girls. Unlike TikTok influencers who relish the scandal knowing it will result in even more attention – partying in a pandemic or filming with “canceled” stars, for example – Charli has gone so far as to refrain from participating in the WAP dance challenge because it involved twerk.

Yet when the eyes of 100 million people gaze, controversy is never out of place. He reared his head last week when the D’Amelio family posted a YouTube video in which the four of them, along with YouTuber James Charles, have dinner prepared by a personal chef. Then someone posted a supercut on TikTok of their worst times.

“Let’s see how ungrateful the D’Amelios are :)” It begins, followed by a series of clips: Dixie gags in the room and throws up later, Charli asks “Do we have any dinosaur nuggets?” in front of the chef and making faces, Charli expressing his desire to reach 100 million followers on the anniversary of his first million. It doesn’t sound great. Some of the main comments: “it made me so crazy goodbye”, “didn’t their parents teach them good manners” and “my god – immaturity”.

After losing nearly a million subscribers, Charli appeared on Instagram Live to apologize in tears and explain that the moments in the video were misinterpreted. “Blatantly disrespecting the fact that I am still a human being is not at all acceptable,” she said, referring to the death threats and violent messages she had received. “I know this will be a huge joke for anyone who sees it, but at the end of the day, be nice. Don’t tell people to kill themselves. I have the impression that it is not that difficult. You can say anything. You can tell I’m disrespectful. You can tell I don’t have basic human decency, but at the end of the day I’m still a person no matter how many followers I have.

The livestream is horrible to watch, as Charli shouldn’t have had to do it in the first place. I watched the entire “Dinner with the D’Amelios” YouTube video. Nothing the sisters did or said was surprising or even remarkable for the teenage girls to do in front of their parents and family friends (which the video clearly shows that the “personal chef” actually is). The gagging, faces, jokes, and general theaters were clearly overused for laughs, despite the fact that the video, like the vast majority of influencer videos on YouTube, isn’t particularly interesting.

This is not a screed against “the culture of cancellation”, but rather a warning about what happens when our collective desire for pandemic-era gossip speaks to the bad. people. It’s a cliché to say that people gossip about other people when they are bored with their own lives, but as we saw during the pandemic, that’s still true. A lot of the celebrity gossip to come out of Covid-19 has been fun and for the most part harmless, but last week’s D’Amelio drama was cruel and unnecessary. Criticizing famous people is important because they influence the way other people behave, but as rude as Charli and Dixie acted, they are artists. And they are teenagers.

You can like Charli D’Amelio for looking like a “normal” high school student, but you also have to accept her when she acts like one. Being sassy at the table, at least for this childless adult, seems like a terrible reason to have someone cancel.

TikTok in the news

• Snapchat’s TikTok copy product, Spotlight, launched yesterday. The company is also setting aside $ 1 million for creators whose videos go viral, which basically proves that in order to create a successful TikTok dupe you’ll have to pay people to be there.
• Introducing the world’s first publicly traded TikTok collab house: A former Chinese healthcare company bought a real estate company that owns a series of Los Angeles TikTok mansions, which now means you can buy the company’s stock at a very low price. But as the New York Times notes, these are captions, and they probably won’t make you rich.

• Sherwin-Williams fired a part-time employee who made TikTok famous by showing the process of mixing paint colors. Says Tanya Chen of BuzzFeed: “Tony Piloseno said that for months he was pointing to his viral account as an example of what Sherwin-Williams could do on social media and market his brand to a younger audience. Instead, it led company staff to investigate his social media account, and they ultimately fired him after determining that he was shooting “ these videos for [his] working hours and with company equipment. “

• Crowdsourcing Ratatouille musical gets the deep dive it deserves on Vulture.
• Obama knows how to make duets!
• Here’s a shameless plug-in for my story on Cringe TikTok, the part of the app where normal people go viral for being embarrassing.

One last thing

I can’t explain why these two girls playing at the nail salon are such a genius, that’s right.