Mattia Polibio

Submission 6,454

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

Mattia Polibio is a popular TikToker known for posting short videos of himself dancing or lip syncing. After quickly gaining over one million followers on TikTok in 2019, Polibio was the subject of a death hoax and was accused of using homophobic slurs in private messages.

Online History

On November 19th, 2018, Mattia Polibio uploaded his first TikTok video. The duet gained over 17,700 likes in a year (shown below, left). By December 2019, his videos began accumulating over 300,000 likes for each post. For example, Polibio's video of himself merely looking at the camera garnered over 402,100 likes in two weeks (shown below, center). On December 25th, Polibio uploaded a dance video which received 648,700 likes in five days (shown below, right). Polibio is also known to post many videos with his friends Kairi^[4] and Alejandro.^[5]

Death Hoax

On December 17th, 2019, a fake news article claiming that Mattia Poblio was killed in a car accident began circulating on Instagram^[1] (shown below). The Channel45News^[2] website article was quickly found to be a hoax.^[11]

Reputation

On November 28th, 2019, Urban Dictionary^[10] user mattia's babygirl defined Mattia Polibio as "The most attractive Tik Tok boy to walk the earth. His dad is Italian and his mom is Mexican but he is more fluent in italian. He lives in New Jersey and has a bunch of hot ass friends who also make tiktoks such as Alejandro and Alvaro and Kairi. These boys will steal your heart." The definition gained 45 upvoted in a month. As of December 2019, Mattia Polibio has over 752,000 followers on Instagram,^[7] 31,000 followers on Twitter^[8] and 2.3 million followers on TikTok.^[9]

Instagram Message Slurs

On December 29th, 2019, after several private message screenshots of Polibio and his friends using slurs began circulating, Polibio tweeted, "idgaf what y’all saw, how real it looks, how much you believe it, it’s not fucking true. not even 1% fucking true" (shown below). The tweet gained over 5,600 likes and 300 retweets in a day.

On December 30th, 2019, Mattia Polibio continued to tweet on the matter saying, "y’all won’t let me breathe for shit. again i don’t give a fuck if you believe the dms or not. i didn’t say that fucking bullshit. cancel, unfollow, do anytning you want… i know what i said and what i didn’t say, and i for sure didn’t say that shit" to which Twitter user @ZEDWlN responded with a Instagram live video of Instagram user Littelmissfestiveswag showing a video of her dms (shown below).

On December 30th, Littelmissfestiveswag^[3] posted censored versions of the screenshots again to Instagram after they were taken down (shown below). The post gained over 770 likes in a few hours.