"I deleted Twitter because I'm trying to create a safer space for myself emotionally," Girls creator Lena Dunham told American radio host Ryan Seacrest at the Golden Globes last January. But by "deleted Twitter" Dunham simply meant that she had removed the app from her phone. Her profile still existed, and she still checked it, though not with the same obsessiveness.

"I don't look at Twitter anymore. I tweet, but I do it through someone else," she told Kara Swisher, host of the podcast Re/code Decode. "I really appreciate that anybody follows me at all, and so I didn't want to cut off my relationship to it completely, but it really, truly wasn't a safe space for me."

Dunham's decision was partially motivated by the online abuse she received after posting a photograph of herself dressed in a sports bra and a pair of boxers on her Instagram page.

"It wasn't a graphic picture," she said. "I was wearing men's boxers, and it turned into the most rabid, disgusting debate about women's bodies, and my Instagram page was somehow the hub for misogynists for the afternoon."

Following the opening weekend of Avengers: Age of Ultron, which took $191.3 million at the US box office last May, director Joss Whedon left Twitter. In his final tweet he said: "Thank you to all the people who've been so kind and funny and inspiring up in here."

Though popular on the social media platform, Whedon has previously complained about the responsibility of having such a big Twitter following, and how involving and distracting it can be.

Whedon is by no means the only celebrity to attract negative attention on the social media website. The instantaneous, unregulated nature of Twitter means that visible figures can quickly become the target of online hatred and bullying. But there are other reasons for celebrities to leave the Twitter sphere: some take short breaks to rejuvenate themselves, some become "trolls" themselves and are advised to leave by their PR companies, and some simply can't be bothered anymore. Here, we take a look at some high profile exits from Twitter