Something I’ve noticed recently while scrolling through the elder millennial cringe on my Bluesky discover feed: people will post media of something straightforwardly enjoyable, like their pets, and say something like ‘I just thought you’d like to see something nice on your feed today!’ — as if their dog is an antidote to the slurry of performative outrage spewing into my face. This is a trend from ten years ago which was only okayish then and is absolutely unacceptable now. During Trump 1 and Woke 1, we were so sick of sharing diseased news stories about building walls and Brexit hysteria that the most superior among us would post a palate cleanser in the form of a flower, a mountain view, or a baby fox. In 2016 this made sense. We were posting through the problem; posting was the same as doing something about it. No time to touch grass, just share a photo of some grass! But in 2026, the polycrisis has matured into an insatiable hydra of never-ending problems and palate cleansers are useless now. Children are addicted to social media! But also everyone’s lonely! But also all the pubs are closing! In the 2010s, problems seemed solvable; now we just add new ones to the pile and laugh at the disastrous wreckage beneath our feet. Remember, 2016 was also the year Trump was sharing photos of 80 people at a rally and calling it 80 thousand. It was the very beginning of our bullshit era. And we had no idea just how much bullshit we as a species could stomach. This is the most amount of bullshit that I’ve ever ingested and I’m not sure if I’m even at capacity yet. All the bullshit is generated for us by AI, and so are the pet videos meant to relieve you from the trauma of online discourse. No one is genuine; all media is completely diseased.
But it’s all going to be okay; have you heard of Ellie Ellis? The 16-year-old girl who posted a ‘get ready with me’ to her six followers on TikTok, and celebrated hitting 100k the very next day. The video was about absolutely nothing. She put her makeup on and talked about how nervous she felt even making the video. A month later, she has over 800k followers. She is so endearingly awkward in these videos that it might make you sick. This is what the people want. Her very sudden popularity is a testament to TikTok’s reach, but also to how desperate all of Western society is for something or someone genuine. We’re out here drowning in supercuts of insane morning routines, AI fruit love stories, and post-ironic content like what you find in r/kitchencels. We are absolutely gagging for a real person to tell us about their day. This month, 2.7 million people watched Ellie Ellis get her GCSE results. Brands have already started sending her gifts. She has representation. This has all happened just because she managed to be earnest and sincere without being annoying. There is absolutely nothing performative about her videos and it’s extremely compelling. She just went to Reading festival with her friends and they all wore outfits sourced almost exclusively from Shein. I already knew that she’d be at Reading because she’d mentioned it several times in the week previous. I know what her nan looks like (great for 80), I know that she passed all her GCSEs — and I don’t care how unhinged this may seem. I’m trying to prioritise my mental health right now. I watch her videos to forget about the rising price of eggs and remember what normal is. She is the palate cleanser 2026 has been asking for. Ellie Ellis is not trying to bait you. She’s just trying to feel good about herself by sharing very low-stakes updates to an invisible audience of roughly 3 million people.
So much of this is less about Ellie Ellis herself and more about how people respond to someone who spun the wheel of algorithmic fortune and got lucky one day. How are we supposed to feel when someone’s unremarkable videos make them famous overnight? The comments on her videos are a mixture of joy and misdirected fury. She went to Starbucks one day, so naturally the adults developing a parasocial relationship with her felt the need to remind her that we’re supposed to be boycotting. Thank you once again for your performative outrage everybody, please remember that the aforementioned woke 1 is over, that’s why we gave it a number: to connote that it is in the past. Another reaction to Ellie Ellis is ‘I don’t get it’ which is fair enough. What’s to get? You don’t have to get it; you don’t even have to watch these videos! There’s something on the internet for everyone! Other frequent comments are the sarcastic, ‘I love supporting small creators’ along with a screenshot of her carrying a heap of shopping bags.
What’s interesting is that a lot of the negative comments read her as an influencer, and a lot of people really hate influencers, because they think they are vacuous and don’t deserve the attention and/or wealth. The influencer economy has been in full swing for well over a decade and people still cannot wrap their heads around the fact that brands will be attracted to accounts that have a lot of engagement, and a lot of the time the people behind those accounts do need to earn a living at some point lol. I’m struggling to even think of Ellie Ellis as a straightforward influencer because her content does not look or feel like influencer content (which I guess is why it’s working). Her videos are long, rambling, badly shot, and unremarkable. Multiple commenters are grateful that their attention spans are finally returning to normal because her videos don’t jump cut every two seconds. Maybe in a couple of years someone would have written a thesis examining whether she’s doing this on purpose or not. Either way, there’s nothing wrong with making money online by posting harmless videos. Thousands of people do it, but it’s never as bad as when a young woman or girl does it. OnlyFans model Levi Coralynn recently went on Instagram saying that hating influencers is just a socially acceptable way to hate women, and she’s right. This is nothing new. People have been hating on influencers to thinly veil their misogyny for a long time, and no one knows this better than OnlyFans models. Which is why they are experts at baiting men into giving them money.
I’ve been lurking in Ellie Ellis’s comment section for like a month now and it got me thinking back to Lil Tay: she was a child influencer, who was likely being exploited by her family, and disappeared after a string of weird viral stunts. When she re-emerged last year, she announced she’d launch an OnlyFans at midnight on her 18th birthday. This was pretty much the stunt to end all stunts; apparently she made a million dollars in less than three hours. You really couldn’t move for all the moral outrage that week. There were calls to ban OnlyFans and even to criminalise p*rn all together. This is one of those events that make the general public ashamed to remember that adult content exists, that people LOVE it, and are willing to pay a lot for it. They then take that shame and swing it in all the wrong directions: e.g. at an adult using OnlyFans for its intended purpose — and not at the men who knew her as a child and couldn’t wait to see her naked. But people would be disgusted either way; the disgust is not just about a young woman legitimately monetising adult content, it’s about a young woman making money full stop. The misogynistic allergy to influencers is rooted in an overall resistance to women being financially independent. Lil Tay is a strange entity shrouded in hoaxes; for all we know the OF stunt was her attempt to get some autonomy back after being exploited for years. Is that what everyone was so upset about? Sometimes it feels like the brains inside the flaccid heads of internet goons are too rotten to grasp the fact that no matter how much they sexualise or infantilise someone, they are still an adult, and they can make money in whatever way they want.
It’s safe to say that Ellie Ellis is pretty much the exact opposite of Lil Tay. Lil Tay would dance around rubbing wads of fake cash onto luxury cars. Meanwhile Ellie Ellis sits on her bed at home going through what she bought in London that day and pausing to show us how cute her cat is. But I think the public perception of influencers is so skewed that both things are seen as unacceptably gratuitous. Technically Ellie Ellis spends all her time talking about clothes, makeup, and how well she’s doing on TikTok. The outrage that she inspires is the same outrage that all female influencers get: she should not be able to make money out of this. It feels too easy. She’s just wading in a sea of consumer products and asking us to clap. Ellie Ellis isn’t actually trying to do anything, except maybe have fun — which is literally what every 16-year-old should have the freedom to do. And I think this is why she’s more confounding than your average influencer: is she actually making money from being genuine? Is she turning on a camera, being herself, and then profiting from that? No editing, no looping, no viral stunts, no endless deception — this likely feels even more unfair to those who love to hate influencers. She’s like a glitch in a very regressive system: she’s remaining true to herself while enjoying financial stability. The fans who beg for her to stay genuine are almost as bad as those who think that monetising cute TikTok videos is morally reprehensible: through giving likes and attention, they think that they are entitled to having a say over how she conducts herself online.
There’s obviously a huge online child safety issue at play here. Other children, much younger than Ellie Ellis, are working as influencers and likely being exploited by their families while developing questionable parasocial relationships with other families. The child influencers receive continuous hate while also drowning in free gifts from brands that want to advertise with them — this is not normal, and is being driven by more than just ‘addictive platforms’. Ultimately there are huge cultural misunderstandings around what makes the internet ‘unsafe’. A digital social space is not a demonic wild-west by default; child exploitation didn’t magically appear when the internet was invented. I will write more about this soon, but ultimately I think Ellie Ellis is great and I am quite literally bracing for a horrible backlash that I am surprised has not happened already.