“My life goal is to make people happy. The pain I feel when I don’t is too much for me. I’ve always been portrayed as the strong clap back girl but I’m just not,” Teigen added. “My desire to be liked and fear of pissing people off has made me somebody you didn’t sign up for, and a different human than I started out here as! Live well, tweeters. Please know all I ever cared about was you!!!”
By Thursday morning, her account was gone.
The model and cookbook author earned than 13.7 million followers — and another 34.4 million on Instagram, where she remains — by sharing a mixture of cooking projects, sharp quips and (usually humorous) behind-the-scenes looks at her marriage with singer John Legend.
“I always have a note in my pocket that says ‘john did it’ just in case I’m murdered because I don’t want to him remarry,” went one such classic, which she tagged with #truelove #tips.
“I didn’t shower all day then I finally did and a fly followed me all the way to the shower. John said I’m the kid from peanuts,” went another.
Her prominence only grew as she traded insults with President Donald Trump on the platform. Trump blocked Teigen during his first year in office but still tweeted about her, calling her “boring” John Legend’s “filthy mouthed wife.” In a pointed response, she tweeted a characterization of Trump that included three expletives.
She was also one of the celebrities that adherents of QAnon, a sprawling set of conspiracy theories, falsely believed to be part of an underground child sex trafficking and cannibalism ring.
Her responses to critics, or “clap backs,” were an integral part of her online brand. When she tweeted that she was a jet-lagged, for example, a user wrote, “i didn’t know you could get private jet lagged?” Her response: “a plane is a plane what do you think it’s a time machine?”
She also often spoke of her celebrity, once tweeting, “Fame is interesting. Celebs are supposed to love you guys while also knowing you’d make a meme out of our dead bodies to get retweets.”
Her departure from Twitter came on the heels of her announcing her partnership with Kris Jenner to create a line of plant-based cleaning products, which drew fervent backlash. This “seems pretty tone deaf. Two wealthy women with housekeeping staff, marketing cleaning products to the middle class in the midst of a pandemic,” one critic said in a now-deleted tweet.
“I really don’t wake up every day trying to make you mad but somehow I manage. and u say I have no talent. that’s something I guess,” Teigen tweeted in response to the wave of criticism, pointedly calling the backlash “mean” at one point and adding, “I’ll never get over it.”
Teigen has long spoken out about the harrying she receives on the platform. “The comments affect me,” she told the “Today” show in February. “Not only do we have our own personal judgment and vendetta against ourselves, but we also have to read and hear these voices online all the time. It’s hard to weed out.”
At the same time, Teigen did serve as something akin to a spokesperson for Twitter in Feb. 2019, when she recorded a “Behind the Tweets” video for the platform, in which she called herself the “unofficial mayor of Twitter.”
The Twitter brass has long been criticized for failing to adequately combat harassment, and Teigen’s departure has reignited conversation.
“Chrissy Teigen quitting Twitter is a really, really bad reflection on the company’s ability to fight abuse. She wasn’t just some famous person. She was a power user, and a fan favorite internally (she spoke at Twitter’s companywide retreat in early 2020). This one will sting,” tweeted Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner.
Tech Crunch’s Drew Olanoff agreed, tweeting, “it’s also a very real sign that using the Internet like this (twitter, facebook, etc) a) has a shelf life and b) has real consequences c) takes a toll d) is in essence, a drug.”