The Real Reason Mary-Kate Olsen Doesn't Have Social Media

Poor Mary-Kate Olsen. She may not exactly be the Garbo of the modern age when it comes to her acting skills, but she may just want to be alone for a sec. And can you blame her? She and her twin Ashley have been subject to public scrutiny every day of their lives since they were infants. Particularly at a time like now, when her not-so-fairytale romance with a much older French banker is ending in divorce. Who wouldn't want a little privacy at a time like this?

Well, perhaps all the wannabe celebs on social media, which was seemingly created for the purpose of giving every single person on the planet their 15 minutes of fame (but failed to build in a mechanism for kicking them offstage once their minutes are up). Meanwhile, neither neither Olsen twin has ever felt the need to toot her own horn, particularly not in such crowded arenas as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al. In fact, both sisters have famously eschewed social media throughout the past decade.

Back in 2011, Olsen spoke with Vogue of her social media anxiety, and refusal to join in the great public overshare-a-thon that was (and is) Twitter and Facebook. As she put it, "We've spent our whole lives trying to not let people have that accessibility, so it would go against everything we've done in our lives to not be in the public." A 2017 interview with Net-a-Porter's The Edit had Ashley speaking for both twins: "Because we don't dive into that whole world [of social media] and we don't have Facebook, we've never been connected to our fans in that way." 

Instead, both twins prefer to connect via their work, which these days revolves around the fashion industry rather than that of entertainment.

The Olsen twins did make a rare social media appearance in December, with Pretty Little Liars alum (and recent Cara Delevingne ex) Ashley Benson posting a short video clip to her Instagram of the them wishing her a happy birthday. They looked très chic and très bored and didn't follow up on any of the comments — most likely because neither one of them has an Instagram account from which to do so. 

In the end, who'd ever have thought that in this age of 24/7 publicity, the ones to show the most restraint would be the oversaturated-in-the-90s Olsen twins? It sure is a funny old millennium we're living in.