How XOBrooklynne Trolled Her Way to The Top

From the most hated song on the internet, to what’s being called the best PR stunt ever.

TikTok tea can be chaotic at the best of times, but, what if that chaos was carefully crafted for months, and it turned out the haters were the butt of the joke the whole time?

Enter, XoBrooklynne—the online persona of 17-year-old TikTok star Brooklynne Webb.

In case you missed it—Brooklynne rose to fame on the app during quarantine last year when she started replying to hate comments on the body positivity videos she’s now built her brand and 10 million followers on.

Alongside those videos were other bursts of self-love content, POV princess videos, and videos of herself singing off-key.

@xobrooklynne

I’ve been working so hard on my music & it’s almost time I can finally share it with all of you <3

♬ original sound - nah

That's what fuelled her latest viral hit, which she’s now revealed is “performance art”, complete satire and ultimately her music career has been a plan to prove a point about online bullying the entire time.

In her new YouTube video titled “How trolling gave me a music career” Brooklynne said hate has been around her no matter what she did, ever since she joined the app.

Source: Instagram

She told NEXT Magazine: “They think I’m a cringy girl boss millennial, even though I’m 17…They think I’m dumb, too. Everyone thinks I’m dumb.”

This is what led to months of strategic planning with her team that brought her song “My Crown” to the world, where she sassily and ironically claps back at the haters.

Of course, the track was met with intense hate and online backlash, specifically for lyrics such as “I’m better than everyone else”.

The internet at large called the song cringey and as it turns out, Brooklynne thinks so too, “It’s a terrible song,” she tells NEXT Magazine.

But the hate did something…

People are talking, almost 40,000 people have used “My Crown” as a soundtrack on TikTok, and she even found herself in the Billboard charts.

And, to mark the end of her short music career (she’s vowing to never sing or release music again), the full album was released on Friday.

Hilariously, the album is literally just 14 tracks of “My Crown” remixed in different ways including a Spanish cover titled “Mi Corona“, a heavy metal rendition, and my favourite, a cover played on the recorder. Genius. Literally iconic.

Here’s the bigger picture, and it’s pretty simple: the more hate it got, the more comments it attracted, the larger the audience grew. This is exactly what Brooklynne wanted.

A 2020 Plan International’s landmark report surveyed 14,00 girls worldwide and revealed 58% of girls and young women aged 15-25 have been exposed to a range of online violence.

Close to half of those have suffered mental and emotional distress as a result and 39% reported body shaming.

Brooklynne told Business Insider she wanted to prove a point about young women not always being the butt of the joke, “I really wanted to stand up for that message, and also show how normalised online bullying has become, even over something as innocent as a cheesy pop song,” she said.

 And it’s worked.

The comment section on the Youtube and TikTok posts are now riddled with praise, a far cry from the initial roasting she received upon the song's release.

“…I just wanted to say that this is the most incredible satire performance I’ve ever seen. The effort that Brooklynne put into all of this just to prove that internet morons can’t see beyond the thickness of their own stupidity is astounding. I’m genuinely in awe of this,” writes one commenter.

If there’s one thing we learn from this chaotic journey, let it be this, taken from Brooklynne’s mouth herself, “it was the haters that blew me up and gave me a music career,” she said.

“You could have just blocked me, scrolled past, not acknowledged it, not given me any attention and it probably wouldn’t have gotten this big, and you could’ve put that energy into something positive.”