Billie Eilish has removed “the internet” from her phone, she said Thursday, in part because she was tired of believing what she read about herself online.
The “Bad Guy” singer told Conan O’Brien that one of the things she hates about the internet is “how gullible it makes you.”
“I believe everything I read on the internet. Me! And I’m sure that’s stupid and I shouldn’t because I have proof that it’s not all true. Almost nothing is true,” said the 21-year-old, who appeared on the comics podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” with brother Finneas O’Connell. “It’s little things, little white lies, that go over everyone’s head, but everyone believes.”
For example, “Little Things” would be a paparazzi photo of her going to the gym, described as “Billie Eilish in Hollywood going to a studio to work on her new album.”
She also dislikes that after growing up with the internet as a preteen and teen, the internet now encompasses a little too much of her.
“I’m doing what I’ve always done and watching the Internet, because I’m an Internet person … and slowly the videos I watch and the things I see on the Internet are about me,” she said. “I’m like, Ew! Stinky! I don’t like that.”
Which brings us back to credulity. Eilish used as an example a video she said she recently appeared hanging out with her friend, neighborhood frontman Jesse Rutherford.
“It was like, ‘Billie Eilish is a horrible person.’ And then it was a really serious video of why. The person seemed very much in the right headspace and they were saying all these things. I was like, ‘Jeez, wow,'” Eilish said. “It’s just such a crazy reality where I’m alive. I’m like, ‘That’s my face. That’s my name. That’s me. Oh, interesting. OK. Okay.'”
And people say things definitively online, as if hearing from God that “this is the truth about Billie and you know it for sure. You don’t know her, but you know this is the truth and you have to tell everyone and everyone will believe it.”
And she knows people will believe it because she always believed it all, even after she had proof that it wasn’t all true, because she was there.
“We don’t know what it does yet,” O’Brien said earlier in the conversation about the Internet, “but I can tell you this: Trying it out doesn’t help the creative process.”
Eilish discussed her relationship with the internet with The Times in July 2021 – two weeks after she decided to stop reading the comments on her Instagram account, where she had nearly 88 million followers at the time (she now has 108 million).
She then decided to just use the app to post and perform, without looking further to see what others were saying.
“Because otherwise I’ll spiral, and s—’s mean as f—,” Eilish said at the time. “Some people, like my brother, can get a text from someone they don’t like and delete it immediately. He won’t even read it.
‘I can not do that. If Satan texted me himself, I’d be like, ‘What did he say?’”
