19 Celebrities Who've Turned Their Back On Social Media

"It’s like a cesspool for evil 15-year-olds."

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1. Selena Gomez

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Even though she's one of the most-followed people on Instagram, Selena Gomez is fully aware of how toxic it can be.

"At one point, Instagram became my whole world. It was really dangerous," she told InStyle. "In my early 20s, I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough. There was a whole period in my life when I thought I needed makeup and never wanted to be seen without it."

Though she retains creative control of her social profiles, the singer has handed the reins over to her manager — which "was the best decision [she] ever made."

"The unnecessary hate and comparisons went away once I put my phone down," she said. 

2. Kristen Stewart

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K. Stew has no doubt that social media has "changed us," as she told V Magazine. 

“It’s not invalid; it’s a new language… But you also become addicted to that hit by yourself and with yourself, every seven minutes or so, and you end up wasting so much time just validating something very superficial in yourself. It has definitely changed us.”

3. Harry Styles

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According to the former 1D member, social media is "super dangerous." In a chat with Timothée Chalamet for i-D, he summed it up pretty well: "Someone once described it to me like a house party, where there are three people who are great and 23 people who aren’t that nice. You just wouldn’t go to that party would you? That kind of summarizes my feelings about social media. I dip in. I see the friends I want to see and I dip out."

4. Lizzo

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In an Instagram Live Q&A session, Lizzo praised the positivity that she gets from fans on social media – but said that the negativity was too much too take. 

"Now I've gotten to a point where I'm not just dealing with internet bullies; I'm dealing with seeing a lot of negativity on the internet dealing with everyone," she said in January 2020. 

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5. Lorde

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Save for a handful of promotional tweets for her new album Solar Power,  Lorde has been conspicuously absent from Twitter since 2018. In a chat with her pal Cazzie David for Interview magazine, she shared the reason for her departure. 

"Part of what made me peace out on social media, apart from feeling like I was losing my free will, was the massive amounts of stress I was feeling about our planet, about systemic racism, and about police brutality in this country," she said.

6. Kelly Marie Tran

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The actor wrote an op-ed for the New York Times after infamously being the target of racist and sexist harassment for months, following her role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” she wrote in 2018.

“Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of colour already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories."

7. Taylor Swift

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The singer said in 2019 that social media can really mess up our priorities. "You feel like there are 3 trillion new invisible hoops that you have to jump through, and you feel like you'll never be able to jump through them all correctly," she told Entertainment Weekly.

8. Zayn Malik

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There's something about these One Direction boys and social media! Zayn told VMAN mag in 2020 that it has generated a culture of followers instead of leaders: "I believe it breeds sheep and not lions. It's become ridiculous to me."

9. Daisy Ridley

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Back in 2016, the Star Wars actor received massive backlash after sharing an anti-gun violence post on her Instagram and Facebook pages. She promptly deleted her accounts and never returned to Instagram. 

"It's not good for me, personally. I'm just not equipped for it. I'm super sensitive — not too sensitive — really feel things," she told Glamour in December 2017.

10. Jennifer Aniston

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The Friends star compared social media to the tabloids of the '00s, in a 2021 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. 

“What the tabloids and the media did to people's personal lives back then, regular people are doing now," she said. 

“Now you've got social media. It's almost like the media handed over the sword to any Joe Schmo sitting behind a computer screen to be a troll or whatever they call them and bully people in comment sections,” Aniston added.

11. Ed Sheeran

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The Brit took a year-long break from social media in 2015, after saying: "I find myself seeing the world through a screen and not my eyes."

Two years later he quit Twitter as well, telling the Sun that one comment can ruin his whole day. 

“I go on it and there’s nothing but people saying mean things. Twitter’s a platform for that. The head-f*** for me has been trying to work out why people dislike me so much."

12. Lili Reinhart

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Lili Reinhart isn't afraid to call out Twitter for its toxicity: "It’s like a cesspool for evil 15-year-olds who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and have nothing better to do,” she said in an Insta story in 2018, just before leaving the platform temporarily. 

"As a whole that site is not good for my mental health, and it isn’t benefitting me anymore. THAT is why I’m taking a break."

13. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Although the New York Democrat still uses Facebook and Twitter for campaigning, AOC has made a concerted effort to stay away from social media in her downtime. 

Speaking on the Skullduggery podcast, she said: "There are amplified impacts for young people, particularly children under the age of 3, with screentime. But I think it has a lot of effects on older people. I think it has effects on everybody. Increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, escapism.”

14. Saoirse Ronan

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Saorise Ronan said in 2018 that she actively steers clear of social media because thinking about what to post is “too stressful.”

She's also commented about how social media can put a lot of pressure on young people. "[Social media] is shouting at us to go out and have sex Right Now, and most young people aren’t ready. They should be allowed to hold onto their innocence."

15. Lena Dunham

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While the recently married Girls star still has active Twitter and Instagram accounts, she said on a 2015 episode of Re/code Decode podcast that social media has a "cancerous" effect on her.

She recalled a time when the comment section on one simple photo "turned into the most rabid, disgusting debate about women's bodies, and my Instagram page was somehow the hub for misogynists for the afternoon."

16. Kate Winslet

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The Titanic actor banned her kids from social media when they were younger. In a 2015 interview with the Sunday Times, she said: "It has a huge impact on young women's self-esteem, because all they ever do is design themselves for people to like them. And what comes along with that? Eating disorders. And that makes my blood boil. And is the reason we don't have any social media in our house."

17. Alec Baldwin

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After his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, was accused of faking a Spanish accent in January 2021, Alec took a stand on social media. 

"Twitter is like a party where everyone is screaming. Not much of a party. Goodbye for now," he shared before deleting his account. He's since returned to Twitter but with a private account.

18. Chrissy Teigen

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In March 2021, Chrissy, who's known for her prolific tweeting, left the platform temporarily. “It no longer serves me positively,” she wrote as a farewell.

“[Women are] just nitpicked and torn apart and it's just brutal. And I think at the scale that some of us receive it at is just too much for any person to take. And so yeah … when the good outweighs the bad again, I will be there.”

19. Pete Davidson

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After his split from ex-fiancé Ariana Grande in 2018, the SNL star deleted his Instagram, posting, "I just don't wanna be on Instagram anymore. Or on any social media platform. The internet is an evil place and it doesn't make me feel good."

He's since returned to the platform but limits comments on his posts. 

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