Lena Dunham Adores Instagram, Still Stays off Twitter

Pervasive online abuse has kept Lena Dunham, the creator of HBO’s “Girls,” off of Twitter — but she’s still okay with Instagram.

The media starlet shared the stage at the Vanity Fair Summit with Instagram’s founder Kevin Systrom. Dunham repeated what she shared in a conversation with Kara Swisher for the Re/code podcast: She no longer uses Twitter because of the “psychic turmoil” of comments on the platform. Instagram, she said, does not suffer this problem to the same degree.

“I think the ability to communicate visually, as well as pictorially, allows for a fuller story to be told,” Dunham said about Instagram. “It’s one of the few things that exists on the Internet that actually improves my life.”

Systrom agreed. “Images are just positive,” he said. “It’s hard to be negative with an image. People love sharing the beauty around us.”

After he said this, however, the Summit displayed one of Dunham’s Instagram posts of herself — one with a blatant misogynist comment highlighted.

In the conversation with Re/code, Dunham compared the abuse she has received on social media to domestic abuse. She later apologized, with a post on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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