TikTok Apple dance producer Charli XCX wants to put an end to trolling

The creator of the TikTok Apple Dance says people trolling a woman who derailed her big moment at a Charli XCX performance doesn’t embody the spirit of “Brat Summer.”

Kelley Heyer was invited by the singer to perform on the New York leg of her Sweat tour on Apple Cam – where a fan performs the dance on big screens.

But a fellow concertgoer who slipped into the picture was targeted by a series of negative comments online about her behavior and appearance after Kelley posted a recent video.

“I really feel sorry for her because she is being treated really unfairly on the internet,” Kelley tells BBC Newsbeat.

“I didn’t want to be someone who belittled this girl for something that was a mistake,” Kelley says, adding that she feels “responsible for disclosing it.”

Named after Charli

The other woman contacted Kelley and apologized, but there were no hard feelings.

“You and I are cool and everyone else wants to be a hater,” Kelley says.

“Putting other women down (and being fatphobic) is not being a brat.”

She believes a lot of the hate comes from “people outside the community who didn’t participate in Brat Summer and are mean.”

“Brat is community and you support your community.”

The song has been streamed over 172 million times on Spotify and reached number eight on the Official UK Singles Chart.

Much of its success can be attributed to the viral dance moves of Kelley, who conveniently lives in the Big Apple.

She reveals that the dance was inspired by an initial lack of appreciation for Apple.

“Maybe people slept on it.”

Kelley, an actor, started using TikTok during the Covid pandemic but had never done a dance before.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be so fun if I made my very first song to this ignored Charli XCX song?”

Kelley wonders if she deserves at least some credit for Apple’s greater success.

“I hesitate to say this because at the end of the day, if Charli wasn’t such a phenomenal artist and performer, I wouldn’t have even had the dance.”

“So I’ll take some credit, but I also want to be humble and acknowledge that it’s still Charli’s song and her great music.”

She was surprised at how long the trend’s success lasted.

“Every time I thought the dance couldn’t reach another peak, it got another wave of virality.”

“Trends die out at some point. This will eventually subside and die, but it just continued throughout the summer. And that just impressed me.”

Despite the moves’ enormous success, she regrets the commercial side of things as she did the dance for free.

“When I see people using TikTok dancing, that’s okay and wonderful.

“But sometimes I see big brands or big YouTubers and they use the dance without acknowledging me or calling me out in any way.”

“And that kind of freaks me out a little bit.

“That could have been a really good opportunity and really good exposure for me,” she says.

However, there are now some opportunities for Kelley, who was born in Hawaii before moving to New York.

“In my emails I get record companies and artists asking me to do dances for them.

“Most of the time I reject them because a lot of people don’t understand how long it takes for something to go viral.”

“I posted Apple every day for two weeks before it went viral and gained any traction,” she says.

Although they are offered money by these labels, they say it is important to understand why Apple has been successful.

“Apple really worked because I wasn’t getting paid for it. Authenticity is really easy for people to recognize.”

“We are inundated with fake authenticity, sponsored content and the like.

“So I think people are really looking for true authenticity,” she says.

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