Gigi Hadid: Social media has taken the ‘dumb model stereotype away’

Gigi Hadid says social media has "taken the dumb model stereotype away".

The 21-year-old model – who is dating Zayn Malik – feels she has "much more control" over who she is because of the profiles she has on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

She said: "We’ve just been given a gift as a generation of being able to show our own personality and have so much control over the person we are to the public, and not just being a face on a page. I think social media has taken the dumb model stereotype away."

And Gigi also offered advice to her fellow avid social media users, insisting none of the negative comments on those sites is "real".

She added to Mashable: "Just realising how it’s not real, how none of it’s real. If all technology just shut down today, all of those comment feeds would just be nothing so you have to your own strength regardless of that stuff and try and find yourself without that stuff."

Meanwhile, Gigi previously admitted she considered quitting modelling because of her online critics.

She shared: "I am human and try not to read it all the time – but it does get to me, I think that when you go through something like that, and you’re really almost letting it affect what you think of yourself – it was getting to a place where I was almost like, ‘Should I be here?’ And I was like, ‘This isn’t okay. I shouldn’t be questioning doing my job because people are being mean on the Internet.

"So I just felt like I wasn’t scared to have a voice. Some people might think that it was maybe aggressive, but I just think that I was doing it because I want to stand up for myself. I think that I have the right to have a say because we all do on social media."