Charli D’Amelio named Forbes’ Social Media Person of the Year

It looks like TikTok superstar Charli D’Amelio is rounding off 2020 in the best possible way, as Forbes Magazine has named her as their Social Media Person of the Year!

This time last year, nobody could have possibly anticipated that Charli D’Amelio would achieve the level of fame and fortune she has now. Time and time again, the 16-year-old has proven that she is a force to be reckoned with.

Once she hit 50 million followers on TikTok in April, she achieved a Guinness World Record for being the most-followed female on the platform. Since then, her following has doubled to over 100 million, making her the first influencer on the platform to reach that benchmark.

With these achievements in mind, it should come as no surprise that, during their annual Social Media Awards, Forbes awarded D’Amelio with their biggest award of the night: Social Media Person of the Year.

Abram Brown, Senior Editor at Forbes, said in an article detailing their social media awards that “no one better personifies the explosion of TikTok than Charli.”

“Eighteen months ago, she was an anonymous Connecticut teenager,” he said. “Today, she’s the most-followed person on TikTok, recently surpassing 100 million followers, a threshold few celebrities have crossed on any app.”

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Brown spoke to fellow TikTok star Jacob Pace about D’Amelio’s rise to fame. Pace, who runs popular TikTok channel Flight House, noted that Charli reaching the 100k benchmark is “insane”, and notes that “TikTok got a lot more attention this year and got a lot more mainstream.”

It seems that Forbes agrees with Pace’s sentiments since, as part of the Social Media Awards, they named TikTok the Disruptive Innovator of the year. Noting how TikTok went from 55 million users worldwide in 2018 to 690 million this year, Brown described the app as being at “the center of internet culture”.

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Charlie D’Amelio has retweeted her father’s re-posting of the Forbes article detailing her win,  butshe is yet to publicly comment on her achievement any further.