On Tuesday morning, Justin Bieber, 22, did the unthinkable: He shut down his Instagram account, essentially cutting himself off from his 77.8 million followers on the social-media site.
Bieber’s Instagram was the latest casualty in his ongoing social-media spat with his 24-year-old ex, Selena Gomez.
Over the weekend, Bieber had posted a flurry of selfies on Instagram with his latest gal pal, Sofia Richie, a 17-year-old model and Lionel Richie’s daughter.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJE984IgYer/
His possessive fan base was unhappy with his new love interest — and, after he threatened to make his account private, so was Gomez.
“If you can’t handle the hate then stop posting pictures of your girlfriend lol — it should be special between you two only,” Gomez wrote on his Instagram photo. “Don’t be mad at your fans. They love you.”
What followed was a master class in pettiness: Bieber accused Gomez of using him for attention, which prompted Gomez to call him out for cheating on her.
‘Their relationship is such a train wreck.’
- Michele Lewis, 31-year-old Bieber fan
“Funny how the ones that cheated multiple times, are pointing the finger at the ones that were forgiving and supportive, no wonder fans are mad. Sad. All love,” she wrote.
Bieber shot back by accusing Gomez of cheating on him with 23-year-old Zayn Malik — then pulled the plug on his account shortly afterward.
In many ways, Justin and Selena are the perfect millennial celebrity relationship — playing out on Instagram and Twitter, with subtweets and hashtags. It’s all online, for anyone to comment on.
They’re the Liz and Dick of our time — with 140-character hissy fits replacing the boozy screaming matches.
“Their relationship is such a train wreck,” Michele Lewis, a 31-year-old Bieber fan from Pittsburgh, tells The Post. “But the idea of these two teen pop stars falling in and out of love feels like a Disney fairy tale, like you’re watching this movie play before your eyes and you want them to be happy. It just seems poetic.”
Their romance started innocently enough in 2009, and it was a match made in Tiger Beat heaven: Bieber was then a 16-year-old YouTube star, and his manager reached out to Gomez’s manager, her mother, about the two possibly collaborating on a project. Gomez, then 17, was the star of Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place.”
What soon followed was a sickly-sweet courtship. Gomez, wanting to maintain her squeaky-clean Disney Princess image, initially kept their relationship under wraps, telling Ellen DeGeneres in September 2010 that she saw Bieber as a “little brother.”
But on New Year’s Eve that year, the two pop stars were spotted smooching. Two months later, in February 2011, the pair made their first public appearance together at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Around that time, teen-idol couples were embroiled in pearl-clutching scandals: Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries was flying off the rails, and Rihanna had just lifted her restraining order on her physically abusive ex, Chris Brown. Bieber and Gomez’s relationship, in contrast, was a cotton-candy love story of two teens going through the highs of a first love.
“I’m eighteen, and I’m going to fall in love,” Gomez gushed to Seventeen magazine in May 2011. “I’m going to hang out with people, and I’m going to explore myself, and I’m okay with that.”
The two spent the rest of the summer canoodling and posting their vacation pics on Instagram. Bieber posted a selfie of himself kissing Gomez on her 18th birthday, captioned “Happy Birthday Baby.” In September 2011, Bieber, flexing his chivalrous muscles, rented out the Staples Center in LA so they could watch “Titanic” in private.
But like all first loves, their whirlwind romance soon came to a screeching halt. In November 2012, the couple announced their first breakup, blaming their busy schedules for the split.
Just a month later, they appeared to be back on. How did their fans know this? There was Bieber posting a selfie with Gomez for all to see. There were no official relationship status updates, just a perfectly noncommittal image to telegraph their love to the masses.
Only adding to the allure of their on-again, off-again affair: Neither had been in a serious relationship with anyone else.
Their romance became increasingly elusive in 2013, with every photo and tweet a clue — as if they were hoping their own fans might give them insight into what was going on between them. Bieber posted an Instagram of the couple cuddling during a getaway in Norway, and reuniting again on the Fourth of July. Gomez, meanwhile, insisted to media outlets that she was single.
“Millennials have seen their parents and older people do relationships in a specific way, which is all about labels and making things official and that often fails and backfires,” Francesca Hogi, a NYC-based dating expert, tells The Post. “And as our societal norms are changing, and people are getting married older, young people see that those old rules don’t apply to them and are more averse to setting clear labels.”
The only time the couple officially confirmed their “on”-again status since their first breakup was in September 2014, when Bieber announced that he and Gomez were back together during a legal deposition, romantically enough.
But the relationship soon soured, with Bieber spotted in Paris that October cavorting with Kendall Jenner, and a video surfaced of Gomez and Bieber fighting at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Still, the pair seemed bent on making their personal grievances public, and using their fans’ reactions as a measure of their own self-worth.
After Paris, Gomez unfollowed Bieber on social media — temporarily, of course — and fired up a series of maudlin tweets: “Sometimes we think we aren’t good enough but then I realize when I think I’m alone I have God. We have to learn the hard way sometimes,” she wrote.
In other words: Whose #team are you on?
By 2015, each was professing to any magazine that would listen that they had moved on — with the usual we-will-always-have-a-special-place-in-each-other’s-hearts platitudes. Things. Were. Seriously. Over.
Bieber would have rumored flings with It girls like Chantel Jeffries and Hailey Baldwin, Gomez with Orlando Bloom and musician Zedd.
But that in no way would stop them from continuously stalking — and taunting — each other. Or getting jealous of others making amorous cameos in their ex’s Instagram feed — basically announcing to the world that they’ve been replaced.
Looking back on her relationship with Bieber, Gomez told W Magazine in February, “I’m so exhausted. I honestly am so done. I care about his health and well-being. But I can’t do it anymore.”
On Tuesday, she took to Snapchat to express her regret over getting dragged into her ex’s drama once more.
Clearly, it’s complicated.