Stephen Fry Quits Twitter With Scrabble Message, Joins Celebrity Exodus
Stephen Fry has become the latest public figure to join the mass Twitter exodus.
The Sandman star, who will soon be seen in The Morning Show, announced his exit from the social media platform on Tuesday (November 8) by posting a photo of Scrabble letters, spelling out the word “Goodbye.”
Fry becomes the latest in a string of celebrities to leave Twitter following the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk, who officially took charge on October 28.
Following a number of proposed changes by the Tesla CEO, including a monthly fee of $8 to obtain a verified blue check mark, various stars have departed the service, including Whoopi Goldberg, Shonda Rhimes, Gigi Hadid, Sara Bareilles, Toni Braxton, and This Is Us executive producer Ken Olin.
Stephen Fry Twitter
Fry was one of the first celebrities to join Twitter during its early days of operation back in 2008. He had 12.5m followers as of Tuesday. However, this isn’t the first time he’s deactivated his account. The actor has had a rocky relationship with the app, having deleted his account five times in total over the years.
In 2016, Fry abandoned Twitter temporarily following a backlash to his “bag lady” joke about costume designer Jenny Beavan after she won the BAFTA for her work on Mad Max: Fury Road. Beavan later defended Fry’s comments, noting that they were close friends and that it was an in-joke between the pair of them.
So where are all these celebs going? Well, Mastodon seems to be the social media app of choice right now. On Monday, a Mastodon account under Fry’s name popped up, though it’s not yet been verified whether it truly belongs to The Dropout actor.
A free and open-source software for microblogging, Mastodon has seen a huge uptick in subscribers since Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It had 381,113 active users as of October 28 and, by November 7, had shot up to more than 1 million active users. So far, the likes of DC CEO James Gunn, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and comedian Kathy Griffin (who was banned from Twitter for impersonating Musk) have joined the rising social media platform.
