TikTok Influencers, Harassment and Fans: Who’s to Blame?

Any creator who speaks out against Chris’s content inevitably receives a wave of threats and harassment. After Toby Phillips, 20, posted a soft-spoken ’90s-style PSA video asking Chris to take responsibility for his fans’ behavior, he too suffered for it.

Mr. Phillips was met with death threats and doxxing attempts.

As the controversy began trending on Thursday, popular creators began to weigh in, including the children of several politicians and celebrities.

Cisco Hernandez, a 15-year-old high school student in San Diego, was dismayed to see that big creators he followed were expressing support for homophobic content. He posted a video about his disappointment and was immediately met with an onslaught of harassment himself. Mr. Hernandez is not a full-time TikTok creator. He has a very small following and was shocked by the vitriol he encountered. “People DMed me telling me to kill myself, a lot of other things,” including homophobic slurs, he said. Mr. Hernandez identifies as bisexual.

Other large TikTok creators began issuing threats to LGBTQ creators for speaking out. In an Instagram Live on Thursday night, Freek Da Gemini, a 21-year-old TikTok creator with more than 750,000 followers, issued threats to a 17-year-old, calling him a slew of homophobic slurs. “I’m saying slurs, yeah I said a slur,” he said on his livestream, adding that the young man could expect to have “blood leaking out of his head” if he encountered him in person.

Chris’s fans say that critiques of his content are overblown. “This has to be the worst display of cancel culture that I’ve ever seen,” a YouTube drama commentator known as Relex said in a video on Thursday. “He’s getting canceled for the facial expressions he’s making in his videos. How are you getting offended by someone who doesn’t even talk?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/style/tiktok-lgbt-harassment-donelij.html