ANGELA WEISS//GETTY IMAGES
Gigi Hadid has officially joined the mass exodus from Twitter following billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.
The company’s decision to remove its whole human rights division, the supermodel said in a statement this past weekend, was the reason she deleted her Twitter account.
“I deactivated my Twitter account today,” Hadid wrote on her Instagram Story. “For a long time, but especially with its new leadership, it’s becoming more and more of a cesspool of hate & bigotry, and it’s not a place I want to be a part of.”
She expressed her regret for feeling the need to sever a place of connection with her fans, adding, “Only sorry to the fans, who I’ve loved connecting with for a decade via Twitter, but I can’t say it’s a safe place for anyone, nor a social platform that will do more good than harm.”
Twitter has been under fire since Musk took control of the company for firing thousands of workers worldwide and implementing a new paid-for subscription model for the platform’s verified blue checks. The removal of the human rights advisor from the corporation was only Musk’s most recent infraction.
Hadid included a tweet from Shannon Raj Singh, a former employee of the counsel, in her Instagram Story. “Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company,” Singh wrote. “I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.”
