TikTok just removed a fake account pretending to be God’s very own Dolly Parton.
It’s the end of a saga that began on Monday when an account pretending to be Parton took a video from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, an organization that provides free books to children, edited the video, and posted it onto TikTok. The original video — which was posted on the @imaginationlibrary’s TikTok account in early 2020 — features Parton in a bright yellow shirt sharing joy during the first few weeks of the pandemic.
“Woohoo! Well hello, I guess I’m on TikTok,” she said. “I just dropped in to say everything’s gonna be OK. You keep the faith.”
The faux Parto account, @itsdollyparton, took that video, removed the watermarks, and reposted it, Insider reported. Other than that bit of doctoring, the videos are the exact same, and it had more than 1 million likes before it was removed, according to Today. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable, but did confirm to Insider that they removed the account for “violating the platform’s guidelines regarding impersonation.”
But it was exciting for the short while that we thought it was real! The queen of country had already made a fairly huge impact on the app, from a trend based on her song “9 to 5” to over 17,000 videos under the “Jolene” audio.
If we’re lucky, Parton might eventually make her way to the app in her own time. After all, in the past few months, we’ve seen Cher, Taylor Swift, Shania Twain, and ABBA come to TikTok.
In the meantime, fake Dolly might want to heed advice from one of Parton’s most famous quotes: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
