Vanity Fair.
After spending most of her formative years on the internet, Billie Eilish is taking a much-needed step back from social media.
The pop star recently revealed that she's deleted all social media apps off of her phone as a way to protect her mental health. “I don’t look at it anymore,” she explained on an upcoming episode of the podcast. “I deleted it all off my phone, which is such a huge deal for me. Cause, dude, you didn’t have the internet to grow up with.” Eilish went on to explain in the preview clip, published Thursday, “For me, it was such a big part of–not my childhood, I wasn’t like an iPad baby, thank god–but honestly, I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the internet that it wasn’t so internet-y that I didn't have a childhood. I really had such a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time.”
But the “Happier Than Ever” singer said her relationship with the internet started to change as she got older. “When I became a pre-teen, there were iPhones, and as I got a little older, there was all of what has become. But being a pre-teen and a teenager on the internet, those were my people. I was one of them. I was one of those people on the internet. And then, to have within myself feel like nothing changed, but suddenly I'm doing what I've always done and looking at the internet because I am an internet person...and slowly the videos that I'm watching and the things that I see on the internet are about me. Ew, stinky, I don't like that,” she said.
This isn't the first time that Eilish has admitted her fame has made her have to seriously reconsider her online activities. In June 2021, she admitted to the that she had completely stopped reading the comments on Instagram. When asked why, she explained, “Because otherwise I will spiral out, and shit’s mean as fuck. There are some people, like my brother [Finneas], who can get a text from someone he doesn’t like and delete it immediately. He won’t even read it. I can’t do that. If Satan himself texted me, I’d be, like, ‘What did he say?’” The Grammy winner continued, “I want to hear what people have to say, and also, because I’ve grown up on the internet, I mostly agree with a lot of what the internet says. Some of the things that they make fun of people for are funny because they’re kinda true, right? Which then worries me because I’m like, ‘Oh, God, are the mean things [about me] actually true? And what are they?’ I want to know them! But I don’t want to know them, because what is that going to do for me? Nothing.”
