A video of a 21-year-old social media influencer tearfully lamenting losing her Instagram followers and not wanting to work a regular job is going viral on the internet.
Jessy Taylor, 21, from Tampa, Florida, shared a video on YouTube in which she said her Instagram account—which boasted more than 113,000 followers—had been deleted.
Taylor claimed her account had been axed because trolls had reported it as spam. With tears streaming down her face, she begged people to stop.
“I want to say to people that have been reporting me, think twice because you are ruining my life.”
She added she wasn’t cut out for a regular 9-to-5 job because she “will never be work material.”
‘Nothing Without My Following’
Taylor, in the teary clip that has been viewed over half a million times, laments she’s “nothing without my following.”“I make all my money online,” she says, “all of it...and I don’t want to lose that. I know people like to see me beat down and be like them, and be like the 90 percenters, people that work 9 to 5...that is not me.”
She lamented her time as a former McDonald’s employee.
“I used to work at McDonald’s before I did YouTube, Instagram, before I had 100,000 followers!” she complained. “Before I had everything in my life I was a [expletive] loser, working at McDonald’s.”
Taylor, who admitted to being a former sex worker, saying her high-profile online persona kept her from slipping “back to that life.”
“The last thing I want to do be is a homeless prostitute in the [expletive] street doing meth. That is the last thing I [expletive] want to do so stop [expletive] trying to ruin my life!”
‘Who’s Laughing Now?’
Taylor’s new Instagram account @duhitsjessy, followed by just over 8000 people, features a screengrab of her since-deleted account @jessytaylorduh, which had an impressive 113,000 followers.A recent post, captioned, “Who’s laughing now btw I’m moving to the UK once my lease up” features an upbeat Taylor lipsyncing to the lyrics: “Oh Jessy, I saw you on YouTube.”
She told the publication that she made $500,000 from her following over the course of three years, but added, “that money does not last.”
“You go to the Gucci store a few times, you pay a couple of months of rent,” she told the publication, adding, “I’m not rich like I used to be.”
Inappropriate Content?
Instagram account deletions typically follow a process where, first, multiple reports are submitted flagging the content as inappropriate on grounds of “spam,” “nudity or pornography,” or “hate speech and symbols.”“They also delete photos that go against the guidelines, so to get your account removed, you must have done something,” Dobre said.
In her video, Dobre referred to a livestream Taylor featured in where she can be heard making racist comments.
“I have never heard anybody say such horrible things, horrible racist things about another person. This was some next level [expletive], ok. She belongs on a reality TV show,” Dobre said.
Taylor told the Insider that she was aware of content in which she made racist comments, for which she apologized.
“That wasn’t from the bottom of my heart,” she told the publication. “At the time I didn’t have that many followers, so I thought if I say this maybe I can get more followers.”
She said that after her Instagram account was deleted, she was so distressed she called the police.
“I felt like it was a homicide,” she said.
“I called the police actually and told them about this, and they said you can’t compare a murder to this, and I was like, no, that’s exactly what it felt like.”
