What’s up with Becca Bloom? It’s been nearly three months since her glitzy Lake Como wedding, where she was adorned in Oscar de la Renta and Van Cleef & Arpels and made the pages of Vogue and the San Francisco Standard. For a while, it seemed like she’d gone radio silent, or, at least, whatever the equivalent of radio silence is for TikTokfluencers known for luxuriating in generational wealth for an adoring fanbase.
Surely, dear reader, you have been waiting with bated breath to find out where Bloom’s been, as I have. She’s been MIA from my TikTok page, as have her legion of sympathizers. The press around her has largely dried up. So, imagine my surprise when, as I was scrolling TikTok last week while on vacation halfway around the world to find out that she is currently embroiled in an honest-to-goodness outrage cycle.
A week ago, she posted a video about “equality.” “Here’s what men don’t understand about equality,” she begins. “You think equality means splitting the bill. Women live in a society where equality has never existed in the first place.”
Bloom goes onto talk about modern dating and the ways it lays bare the realities of gender inequality. She is not wrong! But to talk about this while anti-democratic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-working class, and anti-trans sentiments and policies (among many, many other anti’s) are ascendant feels a bit like shouting that a movie sucks in a burning theater. Surely, there are other, more dire emergencies that Bloom could use her platform to, um, platform.
Besides, there’s the obvious elephant in the room: A rich girl who became famous for her richness is a less than ideal messenger to talk about any vector of inequality.
Then, a day or two later, a young woman in Australia with just over 10,000 followers (an audience that just barely meets the minimum to earn money from TikTok's Creator Fund) ended up in Bloom's crosshairs after she jokingly deigned to ask if Bloom's uber-wealthy family would do their part to address the class inequality that they clearly benefit from.
@bridgeonfilm_ Why are we drooling over billionaires on this app literally giving their two cents on EQUALITY #beccabloom #billionaire #wealthgap #inequality #capitalism
♬ original sound - bridgeonfilm_
The video has a few thousand likes, chump change on TikTok, but Bloom somehow saw it and took umbrage at this obvious gag of a request.
“If you knew even a fraction about me or my family, that question wouldn’t have made it out of your drafts,” Bloom said, also implying that this critic had “cyberbullied” her in the past.
Cyberbullying is bad, but the truth is, we don’t know anything about Bloom or her family aside from the extravagant wealth she performs online. Despite daily posts about her jetset vacays and girlboss economics, she hasn’t told us anything about her family or its struggles with inequality or anything else. (For what it's worth, we've tried to get in contact with her; she has done little press save for a Wall Street Journal puff piece.)
As her comment went viral, other TikTok users got on their smaller platforms to complain about Bloom. One good thing has come of her Streisand effecting herself: The veil of goodwill surrounding her is disappearing. It is not good form to be a sycophant for a billionaire at this current political moment, even one who, sigh, has been heralded for “doing rich right.”
It seems like Bloom may be taking this feedback to heart. In an effort to get back into the collective good graces of TikTok, she has posted twice about going “angel tree shopping,” the longtime but recently mega-viral social media trend of buying a kid’s wish list from a Walmart or Salvation Army.
Buying a few thousand dollars’ worth of toys and gift cards is a drop in the bucket for her, but it’s also a small social good. It’s even better PR! Already, her defenders are back in full force after her social media slip-up. As one of them opined in her latest angel tree campaign: “Miserable people will still find a way to hate from their couches.”
