Chrissy Teigen switches Twitter account to private: 'I'm not strong enough'

Chrissy Teigen (Getty)

Chrissy Teigen has switched her Twitter account to private, telling her followers: “I’m not strong enough”.

The Sports Illustrated model joined a number of high-profile people limiting their contact with fans via social media, writing on Wednesday that her body and mind “cannot handle it anymore”. Only followers confirmed by Teigen can now access her tweets.

The 30-year-old took a step back from network days after criticising the growing culture of online trolling after Kim Kardashian West was held up at gunpoint and then mocked in cruel tweets joking about the assault.

“Fame is interesting,” she wrote on Monday. “Celebs are supposed to love you guys while also knowing you'd make a meme of our dead bodies to get retweets.”

Her tweets in support of Planned Parenthood after an attack on one of its family planning clinics caused anger (“ignorant rants” and “nothing I haven’t seen before” was her response) and her announcement that she had chosen to have a girl through IVF treatment was widely criticised (“Get out of my uterus”). Never one to shy away from taking on her critics, she often sparred with trolls on her page and once found herself embroiled in a spat with Donald Trump.

A number of famous faces have spoken about their treatment online, with Paris Jackson sharing a tearful video questioning why she had become such an “easy target” for online abuse last month: ”I've tried sticking up for myself. I’ve tried the whole blocking the haters thing, not reading the comments … Ignoring it. But it’s hard … when there’s so much of it.“

“I’m just tired of it,” she continued. “And I know I’m not the only one.”

In a bid to combat escalating abuse, Instagram has now rolled out a filtering tooL which was first made available to those with high profile accounts and is now provided to all.