The internet is cruel, and that its cruelty can target anyone without exception.
And two of the most common targets, are celebrities and women.
For more than often famous woman have become sexualized for a multitude of reasons. From how they look or how they behave, and the professional work and so forth, high-profile females are alluring targets to cyberbullies.
And this time, Jenna Ortega is one of the prime targets.
Not only that she is famous, but also because she had reached the age of consent.
Jenna Ortega has quite an impressive list of portfolio, but what really catapulted her to international fame, is her portrayal of Wednesday Addams in the Netflix series Wednesday.
Her performance in this role earned her critical acclaim and numerous award nominations, not to mention how the internet loves her iconic dance.
But what follows that, took a darker turn.
Since she starred in Miller’s Girl, where the public began seeing Ortega portraying an adult, and doing some scenes that imply sex, the young actress is increasingly being sexualized due to her fame, especially that now she is an adult.
And in an episode of The Interview podcast with The New York Times, Ortega opened up about her feelings on AI and social media.
There, she stressed the negative impact that she is experiencing with those two tools.
"I hate AI," she said.
" [...] Did I like being 14 [years old] and making a Twitter account because I was supposed to, and seeing dirty edited content of me as a child? No. It's terrifying. It's corrupt."
"It's wrong. It's disgusting," she added.
" [...] Here's the problem, though. We've opened Pandora's box. Well, it is what it is. It's out there now. We're gonna have to deal with the consequences."
She explained her reason for quitting X because what the platform's users had given her a bad experience.
She said that she was a victim of deepfake.
"One of the first actually, the first DM that I ever opened myself when I was 12 was an unsolicited photo of a man's genitals, and that was just the beginning of what was to come," Ortega said.
"I ended up deleting about two, three years ago because the influx, after [Wednesday] had come out, of these absurd images and photos," she continued.
"They're just so repulsive, and I already was in a confused state that I just deleted it because it was unnecessary, and I didn't need that."
Ortega said that people told her that she needed to keep the account to “build” her “image,” but after realizing that a lot of people were sending her explicit images, she decided to pull herself out.
The many explicit content she received helped solidify her decision to delete X.
“I would make political statements or, just personal ones or just talk about excitement for jobs, and then I was greeted with this stuff. And it was just disgusting,” she said.
"It made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable. Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that."
Making things worse for her, Ortega added that many of her posts on Twitter, before it became X, were flooded with inappropriate images .
“It's awful. [...] So one day, I just woke up and I thought, 'Oh, I don't need this anymore.' So I dropped it,” she added.
When asked on the podcast if she was still “learning to “protect herself,” Ortega agreed, saying, “I’m still learning.”
It's worth noting that while Ortega quits the Elon Musk-owned social media platform, she still retains her Instagram account, where she has way above 30 million followers.
Looking back to how she get to her fame, she couldn't be more grateful.
"There’s times that I regret it, there’s times that my parents regret it," the Scream said.
"Looking back, I wouldn’t change anything. I don’t believe in that because if anything, I’m incredibly grateful for the lessons that it did teach me, and it did teach me so much."
While acknowledging her appreciation for the sudden fame, she admitted that the fame has made managing her mental health and insecurities "much, much harder."
As a celebrity, she definitely knows that the internet has now started sexualizing her through various of posts and images, and videos they create using graphic editing software and AI. And stepping back from social is part of her attempt to remain sane.
"I'm really working on not being so self-critical or just killing myself over things that in the grand scheme of the world with the news and things you see, it's really just not important at all," Ortega said.
"I should be having so much fun right now. So much fun! And I don't. And I should. And I try to remind myself of that."
While her experience with AI is a bad one, the Imagen Award recipient knows that AI could also be used for "incredible things," like to "detect breast cancer" before its progression.
"That's beautiful […] Let's keep it to that," she said, adding, "I would like [AI] to be used with good intent, but we could say that about anything and everything."
Jenna Ortega, the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice star, who debuted in mainstream Hollywood movie in Iron Man 3, is just of the many former child stars who experienced the dark side of social media.
From Miley Cyrus, who transitioned from Hannah Montana to a more adult image, to Lindsay Lohan, after rising in immense fame after The Parent Trap, and more.
Not to mention Selena Gomez, who has been dealing and speaking openly about the toxic nature of social media and its detrimental effects on her mental health.
More recently, the AI issue was surfaced a lot more publicly, when singer Taylor Swift had to deal with a barrage of pornographic AI-generated images of herself.