I was becoming a problem. I was just obsessed with it, and I was obsessed to find out what people were saying and how people, what they thought about me. So I decided to make an announcement, which we unfortunately have to do, and say I’m taking a break from social media. And I tried to position myself and say I’m taking a break from social media because I feel like my mental health will benefit from it.

Initially I started to back off of social media mainly for privacy reasons. But as soon as I was off of it, it was like this huge wave of relief where I felt kind of a weight lifted off of them. Like, oh wow! I don’t have to spend my days scrolling on my phone. I don’t have to be sucked into this anymore. I can actually focus on just living and enjoying my day itself and not focusing so much on what I’m supposed to share or what I’m supposed to receive and take in but actually just live my life.

I started acting before Instagram and Twitter and it was a different thing back then, but we’ve all kind of been swept up and I was swept up in it for a while. It was like, OK, this is what everybody else is doing. I’m going to have this many selfies, I’ve got to get this many likes, I’ve got to do what everybody else is doing. And then I realized that I had started taking part in all of that without really realizing it and figured out that it wasn’t not moving me. So it felt really good to let it go. And I feel much more authentically me when I’m not on it.

Getting off social media was the greatest thing I could have done in terms of my relationship with fans. That sounds really counterintuitive, but when you meet people in real life, the experience is often really pleasant. I can’t remember the last time I had an actual bad time, except if someone was being a little strange or taking too long. The part that can start to make you feel really alienated is sitting on Instagram and interacting with a stranger. I’m just not that type of person. If I’m not on social media, I speak to maybe five people on a daily basis. I just don’t have any desire to be any other way. [...] It gives you such a negative view of what fans are thinking or what they want from you. [...] Flooding yourself with strangers is too much.

At first I didn’t like it at all I felt it divided us as a people, that it sped us up to the point that we lost our morality. But now, I love it especially from the POV of my business I get to be independent on a level of controlling my destiny. We made a lot of people very rich! Of course social media has its pros and cons but that’s with everything. So I just take advantage of what benefits me and my family and block out the dumb shit.

I delete Instagram from my phone probably twice a week. I try to stay away from it as much as possible, but it's hard because now it's how young people connect. The important thing to remember is that social media isn't real and so much of what is being advertised isn't authentic or necessarily the best for your well-being, so you have to take social media with a grain of salt.

Social media is actually making us more emotionally disconnected. Consistently consuming soundbites of people’s lives leads us to piece together a particular idea of reality — one that is far from the truth. We develop such anxiety surrounding social media (and whether or not we’re really living up to the standards expected of us) that we begin to prioritize screen time over real-life face time. As beings who require human intimacy (romantic and not) to survive, it’s becoming a more and more detrimental force in our culture.

Life is not how people see it in movies or on social media. When one’s life is centred around social media, one may start to think that one has a problem. However, it shouldn’t be a do-or-die affair. One can aspire to be more than what one sees. Some people’s lives have been messed up because of social media. They have no understanding of reality again. They believe that living a fake life is is the real thing. They just follow people blindly, not knowing that nobody’s life is perfect.

I can’t really remember when it became a thing but for the longest time, I have always let people in on my personal life outside of what is in the press. I operate my social media as an extension of myself as a human first, and a digital journal when I want it to be.

I'm probably going to delete Twitter. Instagram is not as bad because I can't really see what people say, but [on] Twitter it's just so easy to see everything. So I'm probably going to have to end up deleting that.

I never fuck with Facebook. I absolutely despise social networking. I think it's truly going to result in the destruction of mankind. Sometimes I just wish I didn't live in this time. Before, there was so much more freedom and privacy, and you could truly escape places.

If I didn’t have social media, I’d have no way of getting out my voice.

Social media is already dangerous to our mental health

It’s tough when every time you leave your front door, you are working. You’re on camera. I can’t walk around New York without clicking everywhere I go. And social media was bringing that outside world into my house. I just had to get rid of it. I needed to get back to reality, remind myself of who I am and where I’m from, and just live my life as normally as possible, in my abnormal way. Which is my career, I guess.