Billie Eilish Explains Why She Deleted Social Media Off Her Phone
Billie Eilish has distanced herself from social media by deleting all the apps from her phone. During an interview with Conan O’Brien, the 21-year-old singer revealed why she isn’t online. “I don’t look at it anymore,” she said of social media. “I’ve deleted it all off my phone.” The “Happier Than Ever” singer noted that the drastic move was “such a huge deal” for her.
“I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the internet when 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,” the singer, who was born in 2001, said. “It was computers and games on computers, but barely. We were doing stuff. And then when I became a preteen there were iPhones, and then I got a little older and there was all of what [the internet] has become.”
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As she became a teenager, Eilish found herself to be “one of those people on the internet. And then to, within myself, feel like nothing changed, that I’m doing what I’ve always done and… to just keep doing what I do over the years, and slowly the videos I’m watching and the things I see on the internet are about me. I’m like, ‘Ew! Stinky! I don’t like that.'”
Eilish gave one example of the situation, revealing she was with her boyfriend, Jesse Rutherford, when a video about her popped up online. “It was like, ‘Billie Eilish is a horrible person.’ And then it was a very serious video of why. The person seemed in the right head space and they were saying all of these things. I was like, ‘Jeez, wow,'” she said. “It’s just such a crazy reality that I live in. I’m like, ‘That’s my face. That’s my name. That’s me. Oh, interesting. OK. Alright.'”
“It’s these definitive statements that they know are right, somehow they know, somebody told them,” Eilish continued. “God came down and said, ‘This is the truth about Billie and you know it for a fact. You don’t know her, but you know that this is the truth and you have to tell everybody about it and everyone’s going to believe it.'”
Eilish noted that the other thing that “freaks” her out about the internet “is how gullible it makes you.”
“Anything I read on the internet I believe. Me! And I know for a fact that’s stupid and I shouldn’t do that because I have proof that it’s not all true. Almost none of it’s true,” she said. “It’s, like, little things, small white lies that goes over everybody’s head, but everyone believes. There will be a photo of me somewhere at the gym and then I’ll see paparazzi photos there and that’s what I was doing and it says like: ‘Billie Eilish in Hollywood going to a studio to work on her new album.
She continues, “That’s such a small lie, but I’m like, ‘Why would you even need to lie about that?’ It just is very strange and then it makes me like, ‘Wow, how much was a lie that I was reading when I was looking at the internet all those years?'”