Lana Del Rey Wiped Her Social Media Clean, But Why?

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As is true about any popular singer, Lana Del Rey has quite the social media following: 7 million fans on Twitter and 10.4 million on Instagram. Now, though, there isn’t much left for those millions of people to look at, since Del Rey just deleted most of her tweets and wiped her Instagram completely clean. Several artists have done this over the past few years — Taylor Swift, Donald Glover, Radiohead — but the question here is why?

The aforementioned three cleared out their accounts to drum up attention for an album they were about to announce (or in Glover’s case, possibly out of protest), since deleting the bulk of your web presence is a great way to get people talking. Meanwhile, Lana just released her fifth album Lust For Life that, after a slight delay, topped the charts. Unless she’s planning a super quick follow-up, it seems unlikely this social media blackout is teasing new material.

The only remaining tweet that’s not about one of her album releases is one from 2009 that reads simply, “Love you.” It’s also worth noting that her Facebook page — where she has her biggest social media fan base, of over 12 million people — appears to have been spared by her social media clear-cutting.

While there doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason for Del Rey cleaning out her Twitter and Instagram, maybe her motivation is as simple as wanting a break from the online world. There are hundreds of articles and studies that suggest social media makes us unhappy (here’s a recent one from Time, for example), so this could be something as simple as Del Rey wanting to spend less time aimlessly scrolling, tapping, and clicking.

Read a meditation on the influences behind Lust For Life here.

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