Sam Smith Is Quitting Twitter For A While & We Can’t Imagine Why

Carl Williott | March 2, 2016 9:00 am

It should’ve been a great week for Sam Smith after his Best Original Song Oscar win, but his qausi-flub during his acceptance speech submarined any good vibes he should’ve been riding. And now, after the dust has settled, the singer decided he’s going to take a break from Twitter for a while.

The firestorm all started with his Academy Awards acceptance speech on Sunday (February 28), during which Smith said, “I read an article by Sir Ian McKellen and he said that no openly gay man had won an Oscar. If that is the case, or if that isn’t the case, I want to dedicate this to the LGBT community around the world.” While well-intentioned, the dedication was overshadowed by his lack of research (and by “research” we mean “Googling”) regarding that factoid. And then backstage he only made matters worse when he joked about dating Howard Ashman, the first openly gay male to win an Oscar, clearly unaware that Ashman died of AIDS in 1991.

After getting called out all across the internet and by Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, Smith apologized on Twitter. Wasn’t that exhausting? So now you understand why he decided it was time to log off.

This social media hiatus accompanies Smith’s planned break from performing as he preps his next album/focuses on dating.

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