Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are famously private and notoriously mysterious, aided by the fact that they steer clear of social media and the unanimous allure of the blue checkmark. In keeping with their non-publicized lifestyle, the twins’ younger sister, Elizabeth, shares similar values that keep her off the grid and focused on the present.
While Mary-Kate and Ashley claim to have never had their own social media accounts, Elizabeth has, but no longer does. So why, exactly, do they choose to stay away from social media? Ahead, GRAZIA unloads this answer by way of interviews with the Olsen sisters through the years.
mary-kate and ashley
In a 2011 interview pegged to Mary-Kate and Ashley’s fashion label, The Row, the sisters touched on their refusal to join social media. Doing so, Mary-Kate says, would go against their private lifestyle. “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,” she said. Ashley articulated that just the very thought of making a Twitter account and amassing millions of followers overnight gives her “so much anxiety.”
Six years later, Mary-Kate and Ashley’s stance on social media hasn’t faltered. In a rare interview with Net-a-Porter’s The Edit in 2017, Ashley touched on the twins’ collective disinterest in joining their celebrity peers on digital platforms. “We don’t dive into that world [of social media]; we don’t have Instagram or Facebook. We’ve stayed quite sheltered in that sense.”
The twins are so separated from social media that fans went wild when they filmed a video for self-professed superfan, Ashley Benson, in honor of the Pretty Little Liars star’s 30th birthday in December 2019. The actress posted the clip on social media, and in the accompanying caption, she wrote, “Dreams do come true.” We have yet to see them on the ‘gram again since.
Elizabeth Olsen
On the other hand, the twins’ younger sister, Elizabeth, had an Instagram account but deleted her profile in August 2020 after receiving backlash for not posting a social media tribute to Black Panther costar, Chadwick Boseman. In the weeks following, she participated in an ABC media special honoring the late actor, saying, “It’s only fit to be mourning him like a king.”
In April 2018, the WandaVision star revealed that she used to go back and forth whether or not to keep her Instagram profile. “Every day I think I should delete it,” she admitted. “I still don’t know why I’m on it, then I think well ‘I guess I want to promote Avengers, and then I find myself putting something private up there, and I think, ‘This is stupid, why did I do that? I should delete it immediately.’”
When she did have Instagram, Elizabeth made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t interested in joining Facebook or Twitter. “I just have an old-school mindset,” she told Elle Canada in April 2016. “Also, girls I look up to, like Jennifer Lawrence, Rooney Mara, and Alicia Vikander, don’t have it, and it hasn’t affected their careers remotely.”
She continued, “I’d rather live as private a life as I can. I’m not trying to be a mysterious person, but I’d rather be seen as an actor from job to job. I’ve never lived my life trying to be an influencer; I’m happy keeping my own opinions for fun dinner conversation.”
