Between them, the Australian online personalities who took the stage at the annual TikTok awards on Wednesday have more than 100 million followers – but if you’re over the age of 30, you probably haven’t heard of any of them.
About 3.4m public votes were cast for this year’s TikTok awards, which honour the top creators in categories like beauty, fitness, food, comedy and music. Just about everyone at the invite-only event found fame in a particular niche. Among the online stars in attendance were a quartet of brothers who perform highly choreographed dances in public (160,000 followers), a gay couple who constantly redecorate their home (3.4m followers), and a woman who has built her following on having very long hair (The Aussie Rapunzel, 1.3m followers). Another woman has amassed 1.5m followers by posting videos where she asks strangers if they are currently on their period. These are people who are regularly stopped on the street by fans, and who have so many followers they can make their living from brand deals.
The ceremony, held in Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, was a safe space for the hyper-online. Brand activations encouraged guests to strike a pose in elaborate photo set-ups. Creators in the audience were live on TikTok all night from their seats, having packed their own portable ring lights – often meaning the crowd stayed uncomfortably quiet during the award presentations, as it is hard to clap and hold your phone at the same time. It was impossible to use the bathroom without accidentally crashing a TikTok being filmed in the mirror.
“The main advice I have to give is stay true to yourself and hit post,” TikToker Leah Halton told the room, while accepting the award for video of the year for a 12-second lip-sync video that has been watched 939m times. “You never know where it might take you.”
Entertainment throughout the night spanned the flashy and the absurd. US pop star JoJo Siwa, who performed her song Karma and presented the music artist of the year award (won by an absent Royel Otis). Beatmaker Cyril Riley enlisted Australian Idol runner-up Shannon Noll for a song. Host Robert Irwin brought out a live snake. Branded T-shirts were shot into the crowd from an airgun. The evening’s skincare sponsor even had performers dressed as bottles of their product perform a dance to a jagged electronic track while a DJ dropped disembodied spoken word soundbites like “dermatologist recommended”. There were onstage references to memes that were popular on TikTok this year, like the Four Seasons Orlando Baby.
But the audience weren’t entirely internet natives. In attendance was 76-year-old TV chef Iain “Huey” Hewitson, nominated in the food category and incongruously sharing a table with the twenty and thirtysomethings also up for the award (eventually won by Michael Finch, a former beauty vlogger turned viral chef). Also present was Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, who won the high quality content creator category for his investigations of topics like why coffee makes you poop.
Other winners included ABC personality and primary school teacher Mr. Luke, who posts infectious video updates about the ins and outs of working with “tiny humans”, and took out the learn on TikTok award. Edgar’s Mission, a nonprofit that rescues neglected farm animals, won the TikTok for good award.
One award was presented by NSW’s minister for youth, Rose Jackson, who used her time on stage to speak about how social media should be a place that young people can engage with their leaders and hold them to account – perhaps in reference to the federal government’s proposed social media ban for under-16s. “There is so much potential for the power of TikTok to be used for good,” she said. But that was the closest the proposed ban got to being mentioned on stage all night.
Twenty-three-year-old Bridey Drake was crowned the TikTok creator of the year, the night’s biggest award, for her relatable videos about the struggles of adulthood. She spoke in her acceptance speech about struggling to find her place in the world, until she found acceptance being herself on TikTok. But the ban facing today’s teens wasn’t top of mind for her.
“To be honest with you, I haven’t given it much thought,” she told Guardian Australia. “My whole mind has been so consumed with the awards.”
Kruszelnicki had more to say: “On one hand, we definitely know the human brain does not mature until the early 20s,” he said. “On another hand, it would mean that everybody who goes on social media anywhere has to have an ID and everything they say and do can be tracked by the government … One of the things that bothers me is that if they put in place a unique identifier, then when that identifier gets hacked – and it will be – does that mean that this person’s identity is gone for ever? It’s a complicated situation, and I’m still trying to work it out myself.”
Kruszelnicki, now in his 70s, is a good few decades older than the other winners. But he is still content with his place on TikTok, where he tries to counter misinformation with scientific facts.
“What percentage of medical information floating around [social media] do you think is accurate or correct? It’s 2%,” he said. “If it was bad financial advice you could end up poor, but here you could end up dead. I see my role in all of this as trying, in my own little way, to make the world a better place with fewer dead people.”
