Editorials

The Salt is Real: Celeb Social Media

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5 July 2017

By Alex Khalil

Been a while, right?

Ed Sheeran, the ‘ginger busker who headlined Glastonbury’, according to Twitter, has totally come off the social media site after a tsunami of hate and trolling.  He told The Sun that the account will remain open for automatic updates, but nothing more.

He isn’t the first celebrity to ‘quit’ social media, and will certainly not be the last.

High profile celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Justin Bieber, and Demi Lovato have quit all forms of social media, due to backlash and hate from certain opinions or posts. Daisy Ridley also quit Instagram after she posted an anti-gun picture, and received thousands of hateful and awful comments. Really helping the stereotype of gun lovers. Really.

Bieber deactivated his account after he posted images of himself and Sofia Richie, his girlfriend, after his break up with Selena Gomez.

I think there are two sides to a celebrity deleting an account, however.

First would be what I call The Eminem Conundrum.

Remember 20 years ago, Eminem was at the height of his popularity, with media outlets doing anything to get a scoop on the rapper’s life. Given his ‘broken home’ background and the various references to his unsupportive mother in his songs, it’s unsurprising the media would leap on this kind of stuff. It’s blood in the water, so to speak. Now while no one wants their personal life cannibalised for the sake of newspaper sales, there would always be a catch.

If you make millions every year, there will always be people who want a piece of that. So, if they see you making a scene in public, you’ll be on the news in the next 45 minutes.

It sucks, yes. But you are also making millions. That should be the main thing here. You are making more money than most of us will make in a lifetime. In this case, it is entirely understandable as to why people get salty when celebrities ‘quit’ social media to get over the stress of people not liking them. You’re never going to please everyone.

Ed Sheeran getting upset over some nasty comments online is, to us normies, a bit insulting. Given that the majority of people who follow celebrity social media probably like him.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong and the vast majority of Ed Sheeran’s followers hate him.

Or at least his Irish followers.

Galway Girl was not a good song.

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