Chrissy Teigen explains her Twitter hiatus: 'It's a brutal place' for women

Chrissy Teigen says "women on the internet have it terrible" – but that's not going to stop her from speaking up on social media.

Before the queen of clapbacks returned to Twitter Friday – following a three-week-long hiatus – she explained why she had left the platform in the first place in an interview with USA TODAY.

"It's nothing on Twitter. … It's the people," Teigen says. "Twitter is a platform, but the issue is the people. And one of those people is me, and me personally, I just couldn't do it anymore for my own well-being."

She also says that while people are treated terribly online in general, "it's a brutal place" even more so for women.

"It's hard to just exist as a woman on the internet. We're just nitpicked and torn apart and it's just brutal. And I think at the scale that some of us receive it at is just too much for any person to take. And so yeah … when the good outweighs the bad again, I will be there."

It wasn't long before Teigen decided there was enough good to return. Less than a month after deactivating her account, she tweeted why she came back.

"Turns out it feels TERRIBLE to silence yourself and also no longer enjoy belly chuckles randomly throughout the day and also lose like 2000 (sic) friends at once lol," Teigen tweeted.

"I choose to take the bad with the good!!" she added.

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Going forward though, Teigen has ideas on how to make the internet a safer and less judgmental place for women.

"I would say more women need to rally around women," the author and TV personality says.

"I just want women to always rally around each other, bond with one another, connect with each other, understand, respect, listen to one another and that we are unstoppable when we don't let the patriarchy take us down," she says.

On March 24, Teigen announced that she would be walking away from Twitter.

"It's time for me to say goodbye. This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively, and I think that’s the right time to call something," she wrote in a series of tweets before officially deactivating her account.

"My life goal is to make people happy. The pain I feel when I don’t is too much for me. I’ve always been portrayed as the strong clap back girl but I’m just not."

She returned to the platform April 16.

Teigen is not the first celebrity to ditch social media, or at least take a break from it.

On Jan. 26, Pamela Anderson shared her "last post on Instagram, Twitter (and) Facebook." On Feb. 2, Elon Musk announced to his 48.3 million followers that he was going "off Twitter for a while." On Feb. 27, "Bachelorette" star Rachel Lindsay disabled her Instagram account. And on March 4, Alec Baldwin deactivated his Twitter account because it "wasn't worth" the "harshness."

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Contributing: Sara Moniuszko

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Chrissy Teigen on Twitter hiatus: 'It's a brutal place' for women