Trevor Noah Says Chrissy Teigen Was “Far From the Only A**Hole on Twitter”

Trevor Noah has seen Chrissy Teigen‘s apology post, but he’s not blindly accepting her words and moving on. Instead, the The Daily Show host took viewers on a deep dive into online behavior on last night’s show, unpacking why a popular Twitter personality such as Teigen would stoop so low as to urge a teenager to kill themselves, like she did with Courtney Stodden.

“I think we can all agree that Chrissy Teigen has been a particularly horrible person online,” Noah began, per HuffPost. Teigen herself has admitted she was a “troll” on social media, despite her huge following. Earlier this week, the model released a statement on Medium apologizing for her actions on Twitter, which included repeated attacks on Stodden, who became infamous overnight in 2011 after their marriage to 51-year-old Doug Hutchinson (Stodden was 16 at the time).

While Noah acknowledged that “a lot of people have said mean things on Twitter,” he called out Teigen for sending her targets direct messages after bashing them publicly. “That’s like Mike Tyson coming to punch you one more time at home after the fight,” he said. “It’s pretty fucked up.”

Earlier this week, fashion designer Michael Costello came forward with bullying accusations against Teigen, saying her direct messages from 2014 led him to experience “thoughts of suicide.” His Instagram post came the same day Teigen published her lengthy Medium apology. Noah said that while he’s glad Teigen is “owning up to being a horrible person online,” her apology made him wonder why she “was so brutal to people to begin with.”

“Let’s be real — Chrissy Teigen was far from the only asshole on Twitter,” he said. “She might have been one of the biggest, and one of the best at it, but being on Twitter is a lot like when dogs meet at the park. There’s assholes on display everywhere.”

He added, “Social media pushes people into being their most asshole-ish self. Roasting people, dunking on them, that’s how you get the likes, that’s how you you get the retweets. It’s how you have ‘fun.’ It’s how you get to be part of the group. And the platforms want you to spend all your time on them, so they send you stuff to outrage you,” Noah said, specifically pointing to Twitter’s Trending Topics section.

Social media, he argued, “incentivizes people to be the worst versions of themselves.” Pointing to some of Teigen’s worst offenses, he pointed out that she wasn’t “going up to people in real life” and firing off exactly what she said to them on Twitter. “In fact, most of the things people say to each other online they would never dare say to another human being in real life,” Noah said. Still, he urged his viewers to reflect on why that is. “Until we ask ourselves why, all we’re doing is chasing after the symptoms and not the cause.”