Jenna Ortega Reveals She Deleted Twitter After Receiving Explicit Deepfakes of Herself as a Child

During a recent conversation on The interview podcast for The New York TimesJenna Ortega has shared that receiving sexually explicit deepfakes of herself led her to shut down her Twitter account, now known as X.

“I hate AI,” she said. “Did I like being 14 and creating a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing gross, edited content of me as a kid? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”

In addition to receiving AI-generated pornographic images, the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice The star said her first DM “that I opened when I was 12 was an unsolicited photo of a man's genitals, and that was just the beginning of what was to come.”

“I had a Twitter account and they told me, ‘Oh, you have to do this, you have to build your image,’” Jenna Ortega said. “I ended up deleting it two or three years ago because of the influx of people after the show.” [Wednesday] “I had taken out these absurd images and photos, and I was already in such a state of confusion that I deleted them.”

Ortega added that photos that made her uncomfortable were often unavoidable on the platform. “I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. So one day I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I let it go.”

Now 21, Ortega also shared that one of the ways she deals with life in the spotlight, and inevitably her online presence, is by spending time offline and outdoors, and being less critical of herself.

“I walk all the time,” she says. “If you’re wondering what I’m doing, if my parents are wondering, if I’m not at work or in a meeting, I’m out swimming laps. I’m in a random garden, I’m lying down, I’m napping in a field.”

“I really try not to be too self-critical or kill myself over things that, in the grand scheme of the world, with the news and the things you see, just aren't important at all.”