Amber Heard deactivates her Twitter account, and honestly, who could blame her

As the majority of us who use Twitter on a daily basis continue to try to figure out what to do now that Elon Musk owns it—i.e., the ongoing calculation of whether Musk will be able to drive the social media company well and truly into the ground before he gets bored and annoyed enough to sell it off to someone else at a massive loss—at least one person has gotten out while the getting was at least moderately good: Amber Heard, who, as both one of the single greatest targets of Twitter vitriol over the last few years and Musk’s former romantic partner, may actually be the platonic ideal of a person who does not need to be on The Hell Site anymore.

Thus, while Musk was busy this week panhandling for $8 apiece to keep Twitter’s fraud-blocking verification system in place, online detectives noted that Heard had quietly deactivated her Twitter account. And while it’s not like Heard—whose divorce from, and subsequent legal struggles with, ex-husband Johnny Depp inspired some of the ugliest internet hatemongering we’ve seen in the roughly a century it feels like we’ve been online—was already pretty inactive on social media for obvious reasons, it’s worth noting that she’d didn’t actually seem to deactivate her Twitter account until last week, and still maintains, for instance, a (very quiet) Instagram profile.

Heard, obviously, is a special case, on account of both the amount of anger that was directed toward her, and her personal connection to Musk. (The pair reportedly dated from 2016 to 2017; she spoke positively of him in an interview in 2018; who knows where they’re at now.) But it’s a question that’s going to dog Musk’s Twitter from here on out: How much frustration, dysfunction, and scattershot innovation will the big names that help keep Twitter relevant—to say nothing of the everyday users who generate the content that make it worth anything to advertisers—tolerate, before they, too jump ship?

[via Yahoo! Entertainment]