Jenna Ortega revealed that she deactivated her account on X, formerly called Twitter, after receiving a number of suggestive pictures, including at least one photo of herself generated by artificial intelligence.
“Did I like being 14 and making a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing dirty edited content of me as a child? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong,” the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice actor said in a recent appearance on The New York Times’ The Interview podcast.
The now-21-year-old added that she’s seen AI-generated photos of herself as a child, including those of an explicit nature, and noted that one of the first direct messages that she opened on the social media platform featured an “unsolicited photo of a man’s genitals”.
“And that was just the beginning of what was to come,” she told Interview co-host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Jenna said she was previously told that having an account on the platform was something she had “to do” in order to build her “image” in the early years of her career.
But she ended up deactivating her X account altogether after receiving an “influx” of “absurd images and photos” following the release of the hit Netflix series Wednesday, in which she starred as the titular character.
“I already was in a confused state that I just deleted it,” she said.
Jenna called the experience of receiving the messages “disgusting,” adding that it made her feel “bad” and “uncomfortable.”
“Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that,” she said. “So one day I just woke up, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I dropped it.”