Lili Reinhart Calls Twitter “A Cesspool for Evil 15 Year Olds,” Speaks for All of Us
Twitter is not a good place. Among the social media platforms, it’s probably the most liable to not ban neo-Nazis and bigots and trolls; it’s where takes—bad ones, especially—are born and then borne into the void as quickly as the fire hose of content can bury them. And Lili Reinhart is having it no more.
In a series of text posts on her Instagram Stories Sunday night, Reinhart announced she’s stepping away from Twitter. “Hate to break it to you online trolls: Spreading your hate and overall negativity online won’t make you any less miserable,” she began. “Taking a break from that toxic site and the people on it who feel the need to constantly attack me, my cast mates, my relationship, and Riverdale,” she continued on the next slide.
She kept going: “There’s hate everywhere. But especially twitter. 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 wrote, speaking for all of us, really. “Do people on twitter ever get tired of being so negative”—probably not—“and disrespectful to literally everyone and everything?”
“Are they really that miserable?” she wondered. Then, on the final slide, she posted a graphic “k bye.”
In a fitting farewell to the platform, she didn’t even bother posting the same message to Twitter; Reinhart’s Twitter account is still active, though her last post went up Sunday night before her Instagram series. It was a praise of chocolate-covered potato chips.
The Riverdale actress—who is dating costar Cole Sprouse, the relationship she cited in her Instagram Stories—has spoken at length about her strategy, or, rather, non-strategy, approaching social media. “I like to show off myself as being in my natural habitat,” she told Entertainment Tonight earlier this year. She echoed this in an interview for the cover of Teen Vogue: “I want to be authentic,” she said, “but I also don’t want to give everyone parts of myself that they don’t need to know about.… Even if I’m feeling sad, I try to keep everything positive.”
She told Teen Vogue that she resists reading the replies, but she’s still able to get the last word in once in a while. Like when she responded to a troll who tagged her in a post of some particularly vicious DMs targeting her relationship with Sprouse. But it’s better to not have to deal with that at all, really.
Related: The Riverdale Cast Have All Become Experts at Social Media Clapbacks
