The volume of JoJo Siwa’s often very loud online presence has been suspiciously turned down recently, but it looks like she has her eyes set on coming back like a boomerang. With her major controversy with her pop group XOMG POP!, her poorly received album and claims to have invented gay pop, her sudden affinity for Poland, and Australian social media NDA violations, Siwa has had a busy year. But her moves aren’t going under fans’ radars.
While Siwa has just emerged from the shadows to tease a new project, she’s been very active behind the scenes, dismantling her self-created girl group, XOMG POP! Intentional or not, Siwa appears to tend to abandon things. In the past, it’s been her support for other “Dance Moms” stars, Poland, and now XOMG POP! in its entirety.
“I was a bad girl, I did some bad things”
In February of 2024, Siwa worked herself into a major controversy after a teenage member of her children’s pop music group XOMG POP! released details of her firing to Rolling Stone. Former group member Leigha Sanderson accused Siwa and her mother — often referred to as “Team Siwa” — of creating an abusive work environment. The accusations heavily involved Sanderson’s health issues and Team Siwa’s expectation that she attend a music video shoot mere weeks after she underwent spinal cord surgery. Siwa was also quoted as berating the girls through their headsets during mid-performance.
While Siwa has shockingly skirted around much of the fallout from her activities as the co-creator of XOMG POP!, some fans have just recognized the severity of the situation. Following the publication of Sanderson’s story, Team Siwa had removed close to all direct connections to the group, including their names and presence in branded material. Fans of the group kept up with the internal turmoil by tracking the members’ social media profile pictures. While in XOMG POP!, group members used a distinct headshot of them in one of their performance costumes. The replacement of this image often confirmed the removal of a group member.
On Nov. 9, 2024, XOMG POP! fan Tristan Kevin Gironda (@tkgthebomb) posted screenshots of the members’ Instagram accounts, showing that all eight girls who had been involved with XOMG POP! since its foundation had changed their profile pictures to a non-XOMG headshot. The post captioned “Well it’s officially over…All 8 girls have officially disbanded…XOMG POP! 2021 ~ 2024” exhibits the team’s lack of communication with fans, who, throughout the controversy, have had to resort to keeping tabs on social media accounts to know who in the group was still active.
Team Siwa has denied all accusations since Sanderson came forward, even to the New York Times in an interview published just days before the release of “Karma.” Going much further than a flat denial, Siwa “echoed those denials, claiming that the mother and daughter, Anjie and Leigha Sanderson, were ‘dropped’ by their lawyer ‘because they had an invalid case.‘”
“thou shall not get caught” – the erasure of xomg pop!
While an official statement has yet to be released, based on the changes made to the group’s materials, Team Siwa may have disbanded XOMG POP!. Instead of clarifying the situation, they appear to be setting out to wipe the group’s existence from everything within their reach. In other words, the team has begun to alter the group’s online and social media presence.
Team Siwa had already been removed from the group’s website months before the suspected disbanding. There was no mention of the Peacock series that created the group or the Siwas’s involvement. However, the site no longer showcases any videos of the singers and instead only contains broken links to now-deleted videos and accounts. The link to the group’s store has also been changed. While still operating under the original domain name, xomgpopmerch, the website has been renamed and now directs users to “JoJo Siwa Kids.” The new page only contains links to merchandise featuring Siwa and uses a new design, centering on a cartoon-like image of Siwa.
The only remnants of merchandise featuring group members are in leftover stock and previous collaborations. Earlier in the group’s career, they partnered with dancewear brand California Kisses to create a custom line of activewear inspired by each original member. The collection was featured in the now-deleted music video for the also-deleted original version of the song “That’s What I’m About.” California Kisses is not a surprise choice as the brand is known for partnering with former Dance Moms stars, with Sophia Lucia and Brynn Rumfallo acting as models and spokespersons for the brand. The collection is still available for final sale but with prices marked down significantly.
Reddit users on r/xomgpop noticed in January of 2025 that the group’s videos had begun to disappear from the internet, with their YouTube channel renamed and content deleted. Their TikTok has also disappeared, but the group’s Facebook, Snapchat, and Roblox pages have remained untouched. Even so, the group’s Instagram was heavily altered. All posts have been deleted, and as of Feb. 20, the profile picture has been changed to a cartoon depiction of Siwa — the same one from the “JoJo Siwa Kids” page.
With almost every other online presence removed, it is unclear if the website will be deleted or remain inactive. As of March 2025, the group’s website, under the domain xomgpop.com, is still available but only copyrighted through 2024.
These erasures may have been an easier way for the team to manage a controversy that had the potential to undermine Siwa’s growing empire. But, despite the general success of the quiet and gradual disappearance of XOMG POP!, the team never addressed the issue of the group’s Spotify account. Team Siwa attempted to cover their bases by having what became the final four members of the group re-record every previously released song. In some cases, lyrics were changed to remove anything specific to the girls Siwa no longer wanted in her group. However, their Spotify page is one of the only lasting pieces of evidence that references the original girls.
As of March 2025, the bio posted to the XOMG POP! verified artist page remains a relic of what Siwa may brush under the rug. The group’s Spotify page states, “XOMG POP! is a new girl group created by Jess and JoJo Siwa. XOMG POP! is 5 unique diverse girls that love to sing and dance. Their first single Candy Hearts charted at #19 and the girls have been appeared on tour with JoJo Siwa, performed on the Ellen Show and were semi-finalists on Americas Got Talent.” Grammatical mistakes aside, this bio draws attention to the now-deleted content of the group, possibly placing doubts about Team Siwa’s behavior in listeners’ minds.
As for Siwa’s social media accounts, two posts of her and the seven original members of XOMG POP! still stand. Both are about her appearance on “The Ellen Show” to promote her Peacock mini-series, “Siwas Dance Pop Revolution.”
The Taylor Swift-ification of Jojo Siwa
Siwa has started posting Taylor Swift-esque coded posts with small hints about her next project, one of which spells out “nine years later” with capitalized letters in the otherwise lowercase caption posted on March 6. Additionally, she’s changed her bio on social media to read “March 22nd,” insinuating that a new project will likely be released in honor of the ninth anniversary of something. Unsurprisingly, Siwa’s major pop hit, “Boomerang,” which marked her music debut, was released on June 4, 2016.
Previously, some have speculated that Siwa’s harsh rebrands have been put together to distract her audience from the larger controversies at hand. This is supported by the proximity of the release of “Karma” to the Rolling Stone exposé and the November release of her shockingly explicit “Iced Coffee.” With discussions of XOMG POP! picking back up in November, it is possible that she strategically timed the release of a song with the easily viral lyric “love the way you grindin’ my bean” to distract from her family-friendly content.
While centered on November, the same month, Siwa made an appearance at Rhode Island Comic Con as a featured speaker. While answering questions about whether or not she sees herself as an LGBTQ+ role model, the self-proclaimed “Prime Minister of Gay Pop” claimed that she doesn’t particularly see herself as a role model and instead discussed her own morality. Last year’s bad girl who did bad things expressed a desire to “be a good person.”
“But I don’t want to live my life as ‘I’m a role model, I need to be a role model.’ Or, you’re watching me because I’m a role model so I need to ‘act like’ a role model, right? I wanna live my life and be a good person.”
JoJo Siwa, Rhode Island Comic Con 2024
Siwa’s presence in the industry has proved to be confusing and even contradictory in the eyes of some, but this appears to be being addressed. She’s responding to the criticism that her brand is confusing by splitting her discography. As of March 2025, she has two separate Spotify accounts, JoJo Siwa and JoJo Siwa (Kids). However, even though she is heavily promoting her new music, the monthly listeners as of March 2025 for JoJo Siwa (Kids) dwarfs her main profile by close to 100,000.
Despite the debate on whether or not the allegations made towards Siwa are true, the people involved in this controversy are children. Many of them made their industry debut through “Siwas Dance Pop Revolution,” and with the stripping of the official online documentation of their careers, they may have some difficulty marketing themselves. Some have found some success upon leaving the group, like Kinley Cunningham, who was cast in the Nickelodeon reboot of “The Thundermans,” but the bulk of the group is now left without the force of the Siwas behind them to help launch their careers.
Even if Siwa aspires to be the best version of herself and, as she says, wants to “live [her] life and be a good person,” her past actions, even if covered up, appear to be coming back to bite her. She may want to consult her own discography for advice, but it seems that even that will be a reminder that “Karma’s a b*tch.”