Selena Gomez Admits Taking 4 Years Off Instagram, Team Was Posting For Her

By Floralyn Teodoro

Selena Gomez has opened up about her four-year-long hiatus from Instagram.

On Wednesday, the "Rare Beauty" founder graced the 2024 TIME100 Summit in New York City. She spoke onstage alongside TIME senior editor Lucy Feldman and Rare Beauty's VP of Social Impact and Inclusion Elyse Cohen.

Aside from talking about her makeup brand, she was asked about her relationship with social media, especially since she's the most-followed woman on Instagram.

"Well, I took four years off of Instagram, and I let my team post for me for those years. I felt like it was the most rewarding gift I gave myself," she confessed.

"I was more present. I was happier. I would get real phone calls [from] people telling me about their story, and I could actually hear it... It was more human."

Talking about social media in general, she said it frustrates her.

"I find it frustrating. Then I get a little mouthy, and I want to defend the people I love. It's just, I think it's important to take breaks," noted the actress-singer with over 429 million followers on the platform.

"So I try to not pay much attention, I just do things here and there."

The "Only Murders in the Building" actress' first known social media break happened around March 2016, when she prioritized her mental health, according to Vulture. So far, she has reportedly taken eight social media breaks through the years.

In an interview with Vogue the following year after her first known Instagram hiatus, she talked about why she was "ghosting" the platform and said that it "sort of freaked [her] out" because she was the most followed user after accumulating 110 million followers at the time.

"As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out. It had become so consuming to me. It's what I woke up to and went to sleep to," she said.

"I was an addict, and it felt like I was seeing things I didn't want to see like it was putting things in my head that I didn't want to care about. I always end up feeling like s**t when I look at Instagram, which is why I'm kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit."