TikTok’s Gray Wave

@sarah_dreary

TIKTOK IS WHERE NEW GEN Z ENTERTAIN-ment stars are minted. Ambitious young people like 20-year Addison Rae and 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio have been able to amass huge audiences on the social media platform (D’Amelio’s tops 100 million) by dancing, singing, lip-syncing, pulling pranks, performing skits and whatever else they can think of in short videos, most of which last between 15 seconds and a minute.

Overwhelmingly, it’s a place for kids.“Most social media is youth-oriented,” says TikTok star Stephen Austin. But maybe not just kids anymore. Austin, for instance is 82 years old and is known to his 1.4 million TikTok fans as “Old Man Steve”

While not quite in D’Amelio and Rae’s league (yet anyway) Austin and several other elder social media stars have developed big TikTok followings over the last few