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Lady Gaga Defends Ed Sheeran Against Cyberbullies After He Quits Twitter

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Updated on June 15, 2023

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Ed Sheeran recently abandoned Twitter due to the harsh remarks, proving that cyberbullying can affect anybody, even someone who headlined Glastonbury.

Mother Monster stepped up to defend Sheeran after he revealed to The Sun that he had withdrawn himself from the Twitterverse due to nasty Internet trolls. Lady Gaga posted a photo with the music mogul on July 4th, saying that he “deserves all our love and respect like all humans do.”

Lady Gaga expressed her support for Ed Sheeran at 12:15 p.m. PT on Tuesday. “What an incredible talented artist I LOVE ED @edsheeran deserves all our love and respect like all humans do,” she wrote on Instagram. “I wish all people on the internet would be positive and loving and apart of creating an online community that is kind and empowering, not hateful and mean. No reason to tear down an artist simply because they are on top. Work harder to be kinder everybody. That should be your first duty to humanity.”

One of the most challenging parts of being bullied as an adult, as Lifehacker points out, is the ambiguity: “What’s more frustrating about adult bullies, however, is they’ve gotten much better at hiding what they do.” Nobody is giving Sheeran a wedgie; instead, they’re sending him venomous tweets. As a result, one of the most effective parts of Mother Monster’s work is that she calls out abusive conduct as such, labeling it “hateful and mean.”

Sheeran told The Sun earlier this week that bullies on Twitter are preventing him from enjoying the site. Instagram is his preferred social media channel, as his admirers know, and the majority of his tweets appear to be auto-generated messages linked to his Instagram account.

Bullies engage in harmful conduct because they “crave attention, so they show off and act tough in order to get it from their peers,” according to books like Bullying in American Schools: Causes, Preventions, and Interventions, published in 2003. While the focus of this book is clearly on the psychology of a child bully, it appears that the same rationale might apply to an adult cyberbully. After all, few platforms allow users to flaunt their accomplishments in front of as many people as Twitter does; this could explain why the platform has had troll issues, as The Guardian reported in 2017: “Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, said Twitter still relied too heavily on its users to root out and report abusive material.”

Lady Gaga fans have been particularly harsh on Sheeran on social media, according to E! News, after Sheeran appeared to disparage Gaga during a Beats Radio 1 interview with Zane Lowe earlier this year.

“I do not want to be the kind of artist who has had two successful albums and then feels invincible. I have to know when to listen to people, or I’ll end up like those artists you’ve interviewed in recent years. You’ve seen them become the biggest artists in the world, and then suddenly they will say, ‘I know everything!’ And just after, they are no longer at the top,” Sheeran said at the time, without naming names. “The smartest thing to do is listen to people who know I do not want to do the Super Bowl years later, after my biggest success, just to prove I’m still relevant.”