A 21-year-old influencer is going viral not for her influence, but for comparing Instagram deleting her account to a “homicide.”
In a video explaining her feelings last week, Jessy Taylor sobbed, calling it a “beg for help” to retrieve her deleted account, where she had more than 100K followers and reportedly posted bikini selfies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQonbtV2iaA
“I don’t know why it’s not working out for me,” she says in the video, which had 18K thumbs-down responses and 1.1K likes. “I’m nothing without my following.”
Taylor told Insider that her account was taken down by “haters” who flagged it as spam. However, she reportedly has a past of saying racist things, which she declined to comment about on the record. Information Overload, a YouTube channel that reports on what’s trending on the platform, reported that Taylor had openly claimed she was a racist and called a Black woman a “hoodrat.”
“When people try to hate on me, report me, I literally try to be a fucking better person,” Taylor says in her YouTube video. “I wanted to say to everybody that’s been reporting me, think twice because you’re ruining my life. Because I make all of my money online.”
She told Insider that she felt she’d been “murdered” after her account got taken off.
“I called the police actually and told them about this,” she told the site, “and they said you can’t compare a murder to this, and I was like, no, that’s exactly what it felt like.”
In the video, she emphasizes that influencing is her livelihood. “I know people like to see me be down, be like them, be like the 90 percenters, people that work 9-5, that is not me,” she says. “I’m in L.A. to not be like that. I worked so fucking hard to get to where I’m at, and for that to get taken from me is the worst fucking feeling in the world.”
Taylor wrote in the video’s comments that she’s starting a new Instagram account @duhitsjessy, though it’s unclear if it’s “new” because the first photo in the account is from eight weeks ago. She already has more than 13K followers and a lot of comments from people who wanted to let her know they’d reported her account (again).
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