There Are No Girls on the Internet - Why everyone is mad at Jimmy Fallon and Addison Rae

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

TikTok star Addison Rae’s dance segment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon sparked conversations about crediting Black creators online.For more on Black digital creators and credit, check out this episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet with digital creator Mars Sebastian: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet/id1520715907 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. If you don't follow TikTok, you might not know like everyone is mad at Jimmy Fallon and Addison Ray. Let me break it down for you. Last week on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, TikTok dance star Addison Ray joined host Jimmy Fallon for a segment called Addison Ray teaches Jimmy eight TikTok dances. Now on its face, it was a cute segment where Addison Ray showed Jimmy Fallon how to do eight dances that have gone viral on the platform TikTok,

as Jimmy held up signs for the audience with each dance's name. But the backlash started when folks pointed out that, like most viral dances on TikTok, the dances were created by black youth on the platform. Now, Jimmy Fallon's team says when they uploaded the segment to YouTube, they included the credits in the description. But that's pretty different from crediting them on the show. And it would have been pretty easy to put the name of the creator on the title card,

but they didn't. If you were watching, you might have even thought that Addison, who is white, created the dances. This is just the latest example of what black creators on social media say happens to them all the time. They create something that takes off on social media platforms, and it's just assumed to belong to the entire internet, which on its face doesn't seem so terrible, but it actually does matter who gets credit for things that go big online and who doesn't.

Other people benefit materially from things that black people create online, while those original black creators go overlooked, and in some cases, completely unnamed. We in this beach, gonna get crunk, Abraise on Fleek, the fuck. Most of us had heard the expression on fleek. I heard it in advertisements from everything

from hefty bags to Arby's. But Peaches Monroe, the black teen who first popularized the expression in a vine video, didn't see a dime from the corporations who capitalized off of her creation. This happens again and again, especially on platforms like TikTok.

Last year, 14-year-old Jalila Harmon filmed herself doing the renegade dance on Instagram. TikTok user Global.Jones copied the dance on TikTok, and it started spreading. That's when huge TikToker, Charlie Demilio, who has over 100,000 followers on the platform, posted a video of herself doing it, and then it took off like Wildfire. The dance showed up on big shows like Good Morning America. Only nobody credited Jalila, and Charlie Demilio became known as, quote, the CEO of the Renegade Dance Challenge.

Now compare that to someone like kombucha girl, a white woman named Brittany Tomlson. When Britney's hilarious TikTok video of her skeptical taste testing kombucha for the first time went viral, she was credited and ended up being in a Super Bowl commercial because of that TikTok. Meanwhile, it took users on social media to aggressively advocate for Jalila for her to even be credited with creating the Renegade Challenge. Getting credited for things that you create online can be life-changing. It can mean opportunities, endorsements, and more. and it shouldn't be such a fight for black creators to simply be credited for what they create online. Law professor KJ. Green argues that both online and offline,

black public creativity has been rendered public domain in ways that can often leave black creators getting screwed. Now, black folks have always had our stuff stolen. But the speed of the internet means that our intellectual property, our dances and jokes and ideas, can be stolen really quickly. As Shamira Ibrahim puts it over at broadly, this means the means in which black niches have been rifled through, hand-selected and proliferated, may not be new, but the advent of social media has accelerated the speed at which these trends have floored into the mainstream and ultimately corporatized for gain, especially in instances where the nuances of the privacy policy

may contain obscure language that allows for corporations to own, license, and publish, original and innovative content at their whim, however unethical it may be. Now, Addison Ray has since acknowledged the backlash to the Jimmy Fallon segment. It's kind of hard to credit during the show, but, But they all know that I love them so much. I mean, I support all of them so much. And hopefully one day we can all meet up and dance together. I want to see a world where crediting black digital creators for their brilliance isn't just an afterthought.

To hear more about black digital creators and the struggle to be credited, check out the episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet with Black Creator Marr Sebastian. You can find the link to the full episode in the show description. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangodi.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not. Quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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