Social Media Users Started A Campaign To Ignore Kim Kardashian & Other Celebs On TikTok, & It Appears To Be Having An Impact
Patience for stars' antics has been wearing thin for years now. What's behind this latest trend?
Kathy Hutchins | Shutterstock | Canva Pro It's been a rough few years for celebrities, with many fans online saying they've had it with Hollywood luminaries' ostentatious wealth and self-absorption amid economic and political turmoil the rest of us have to deal with.
But it hasn't seemed to have had much real impact on them, their businesses, or their influence in culture and media. A new social media campaign, however, suggests they may not be as invulnerable as they seem, and that fans' patience for celebrities may truly be wearing thing.
Social media users started a campaign to 'ignore' celebrities like Kim Kardashian, and it seems to be having an impact.
The trend started on TikTok and seems to have moved to Kim Kardashian after first starting with a focus on JoJo Siwa.
The trend appears to have begun after a creator known as Anita posted a video with onscreen text reading, "bruh, imagine if we all started ignoring celebrities, like how hilarious would it be if they posted and got like 13 likes."
Commenters on the video quickly settled on Siwa as the first target before moving onto Kardashian, as well as Lizzo. And it does appear to be having a very real effect on Siwa's and Kardashian's engagement on the app.
There also appear to have been several iterations of Anita's video, all with identical text, as well as several nearly identical response videos reporting the drops in engagement.
This suggests that this "trend" might be an incidence of "astroturfing," an orchestrated online PR campaign that basically fakes organic, grassroots social media activity. Regardless, the impact is undeniable.
The campaign seems to be putting a major dent in celebrities' engagement.
After starting with Siwa, the campaign quickly moved on to Kardashian, and the impact has been "literally terrible," in the words of one creator who commented on the trend, referencing Kardashian's latest TikTok post announcing her collaboration with clothing brand North Face.
As of this writing, that video has nearly 5 million views but less than 100,000 likes and 3,300 comments — frankly, abysmal numbers, especially for a celebrity of her stature. It's important to remember that for celebrities, social media is a business, and nowadays, it's often more lucrative than their actual creative endeavors. So, these numbers matter.
The rule of thumb for solid engagement-to-likes ratios on TikTok is 1 like for every 10 views and 1 comment for every 100 views. By that metric, Kardashian's North Face video should have at least half a million likes and 50,000 comments — orders of magnitude more than she got. Her second most recent video did even worse — more than 10 million views but only about 65,000 likes and 4,800 comments.
Videos by Lizzo and JoJo Siwa, who have also been targeted by the campaign, have had similar results, with Siwa's being the most pronounced. Her latest video has more than 43 million views as of this writing, with about 90,000 likes and nearly 19,000 comments.
People have been tiring of celebrities for a while now, but the reasons behind this campaign aren't clear.
It's certainly no secret that the past few years have been a lot more uphill for the Kardashian clan than before. Their Hulu show "The Kardashians," which launched in 2022, has garnered huge viewership but has never matched the influence of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians." Even in subreddits run by the clan's most ardent fans, expressions of frustration and boredom with the family's antics are a regular occurrence.
Siwa and Lizzo, too, have proven divisive, the former for her over-the-top persona and ubiquity, and the latter for her legal troubles and weight loss, which many former fans seem to find traitorous after her advocacy for fat acceptance.
Kardashian has also been unabashed about her social ties to Ivanka Trump and admiration for Tesla CEO-turned-MAGA-politician Elon Musk. Given that Donald Trump's 2024 popular vote win has vanished entirely as votes have continued to be counted since Election Night, it's not surprising that these political shout-outs might not be resonating with the gen pop.
And, of course, the celebrity-industrial complex has been losing popularity across the board in recent years, seemingly starting with that insanely tone-deaf video of celebrities singing "Imagine" during the earliest, scariest days of 2020 and culminating earlier this year during the Met Gala, when similar campaigns arose to block celebrities and influencers who refused to voice support for the people of Gaza.
Still, the seemingly coordinated nature of this campaign is ominous — especially where Siwa is concerned since she has been the subject of quite a bit of right-wing homophobic backlash of late. In our political climate, it's hard not to wonder what, and more importantly who, is actually behind this "trend."
It's also unlikely to work in the long term — when it comes to social media, engagement is engagement. Whether it comes from sincere enjoyment or hate-watching while gawking at how few likes a celebrity's post got, attention is attention, and the algorithms don't discriminate.
Regardless, in a country increasingly gripped by economic and political turmoil, it's understandable that a lot of us have simply had it with celebrities, especially ones who have the temerity to say, "Nobody wants to work these days" after rising to the billionaire class by being rich and famous for simply growing up rich and famous.
Whether it works or not, when it comes to the "ignore celebrities" trend, you can't blame people for trying.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.