Ryan Tubridy has revealed the real reason he quit Twitter.
The Late Late Show host left the social media platform in August 2011, tweeting a farewell to his followers: “Dear Twitter, this is my last tweet. It’s been lots of fun but I must leave. No drama, just not enough time. Thanks and take care. #goodbye.”
The Ryan Tubridy Show and The Late Late Show still have dedicated Twitter accounts with 53.2K and 238.1K followers respectively.
Speaking on The 2 Johnnies Podcast, Ryan admitted: “I was on [Twitter] for a while, and when I was on it, I’d finish The Late Late Show and I’d go out and be having a beer afterwards and I’d be going through it [reading] ‘You’re this, that and the other’ – and [thinking] ‘why am I looking at this?'”
“My daughter turned around to me at one stage when I was on the phone, and I was a little bit addicted to Twitter because it’s easy to be; She was about 14 or 15 [at the time], smart girl as she is, and she said ‘I can’t believe you’re on the phone again.'”
“When your teenage daughter says ‘You’re on the phone again’, you’re in trouble – and I was in trouble,” Ryan candidly explained.
Ryan continued: “I was going to the pub to meet my brothers, as I do, and I was walking in and I sent one last tweet, and I said ‘Listen everybody, it’s been lovely – but I’m out.'”
“It wasn’t about being bullied off it, people have this story that I was bullied off Twitter – I wasn’t at all. I’m much stronger than that in the sense that I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of that.”
“I will say, it was actually [my daughter] that said ‘You’re on the phone again’, so I said ‘Good luck everybody, goodbye’ and with that I left and I had made one of the greatest decisions of my working and, dare I say, my private life,” he admitted.
“I was looking for more attention, I didn’t need it – [I’ve] got a chat show, [I’ve] got a radio show – what the hell [more] do you need?”
Ryan continued: “[Twitter]’s so mean and I feel so sorry for people who are in the public eye who are on it, because I don’t think it’s going to do anything for you.”
After five years off Twitter, Ryan joined Instagram in 2016, which he thinks is incredibly tame in comparison.
