Addison Rae, the influencer and aspiring movie star largely responsible for the mainstreaming of TikTok, was temporarily booted from the platform on Thursday night, according to a tweet she posted on her account.
“Well time to get a job,” the 21-year-old influencer, who has 85 million followers, tweeted, accompanied by a screengrab of a notification that her account had been banned due to “multiple violations of our Community Guidelines.”
Well time to get a job pic.twitter.com/BJ4xDyFfko
— Addison Rae (@whoisaddison) October 15, 2021
As of Friday morning, Rae’s page appears to be back online, with her last video being a sponsored ad for Nintendo that she posted a day ago. But it’s not the first time that Rae’s account has been deleted: in August of 2020, it was temporarily erased after it was hacked.
It’s unclear why she was banned in the first place, although it is fairly common for trolls to spam large creators, particularly women, with community guidelines violations reports in an effort to get their accounts taken down. Some on social media speculated that Rae may have been banned over one of her last posts: a video of her dancing in a blue dress that briefly zooms in on her (clothed) rear end. But her content in general is fairly innocuous, and is largely a mix of sponsored posts and short dance videos. A spokesperson for TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Rae’s team.
Rae is one of the most-followed creators on TikTok, ranking third behind dancer Charli D’Amelio and the Italian TikToker Khaby Lame. She rose to fame in 2019 after joining the platform, racking up millions of views on her dance videos and briefly associating with the high-profile collab house the Hype House. Despite garnering some criticism for cultural appropriation, especially following a much-lambasted appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, she has successfully crossed over into mainstream culture, winning a lead role in Netflix’s recently released She’s All That reboot He’s All That and debuting her single “Obsessed” earlier this year.
Rae’s experience — immediately getting her account back after being banned from the platform, which is notoriously stringent about cracking down on sexualized content — is somewhat singular. As Rolling Stone has previously reported, many smaller creators have reported having their accounts taken down without warning for violating TikTok’s sex and nudity policy, even if the content in question was not sexually suggestive at all. Sex workers, in particular, have criticized TikTok for purging smaller creators who link to their OnlyFans accounts while allowing celebrities like Bella Thorne to do so on the app (as of this writing, Thorne no longer has a link to her OnlyFans on her TikTok).