Selena Gomez Has an Important Message About Trolling
Selena Gomez recently announced that she deleted her Instagram account from her phone. Her message is primarily about how the platform was affecting her mental health and self-esteem.
“I used to use it a lot but I think it’s become really unhealthy for young people, including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all of these comments and letting this stuff in,” Selena said during an interview with Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest about the new Jarmusch zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die.
When talking about trolling, or the modern phenomenon of online anonymous commentating, Selena compared trolls as “want[ing] to cut to your soul…Imagine all the insecurities that you already feel about yourself and having someone write a paragraph pointing out every little thing – even if it’s just physical.”
Selena’s message is incredibly important these days, considering the political atmosphere that we are now immersed in. The ability to separate one’s sense of self-esteem from how anonymous online accounts respond has become increasingly difficult for many people. With that, the ability to differentiate between what accounts that are responding are genuine fans or just people trying to create animosity has also become blurred.
Selena still has an Instagram account, but has an assistant keep it on their phone on her behalf. She says that when she wants to post something, she asks to use their phone and it keeps a healthy boundary between the tendency to obsess over how people respond to her posts.
The singer has also recently spoken out against the abortion bans in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, and currently has a link to support Planned Parenthood on her Instagram bio.
