Get Real with Caroline Hobby · Nashville Podcast Network

Getting Real with Lee Tilghman About The Dark Side of Social Media

·43 min·3 clips

Lee says followers called her racist after a workshop and turned on her almost immediately.

1. Get Real with Caroline Hobby focuses on Lee Tilghman’s memoir about the dark side of social media and influencer life. 2. Caroline Hobby hosts the interview, and Lee Tilghman appears as the guest because she wrote the memoir and lived the influencer career she describes. 3. The episode asks what happens when a young woman builds identity, income, and validation through AIM, blogging, Instagram, and wellness content. 4. Lee says the book was healing to write and calls it “the first influencer memoir of its kind.” 5. Caroline links Lee’s childhood to a family incident that involved police, a sister’s 16th birthday, and feeling unseen in her home. 6. Lee says she did “a lot of therapy and healing and inner work” before she could write honestly about her family. 7. She describes family life as “good and bad,” not “all good or all bad,” and says her parents used “the tools that they had at the time.” 8. Lee says AIM was a major communication tool when she was young and that she started online socializing around age 12. 9. She says an older man took advantage of her at 15, and Caroline connects that experience to later feelings of being misunderstood. 10. Lee says girls receive strong messages about being “liked” and “likable,” and she ties that to the culture around Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Britney Spears. 11. Lee says she had an eating disorder as a child and treatment forced her to reconnect with her body. 12. She says wellness became her identity, and she embraced labels like “gluten-free,” “dairy-free,” “soy-free,” and “sugar-free.” 13. Lee says finding Instagram followers who shared self-experimentation around diet gave her belonging. 14. She says she eventually realized she had “lost my way” even though the wellness journey began with well-meaning intentions. 15. Lee says she had nearly 400,000 Instagram followers and made $300,000 a year through brand deals before her breakdown. 16. She says her apartment flooded and she realized she only wanted her dog and her passport, not her influencing career. 17. Lee says a workshop announcement triggered backlash, including accusations that she was racist, greedy, and price prohibitive. 18. She says that moment taught her about mob mentality, online hate groups, cancel culture, feminism, and the need to put real life before social media. 19. The interview style is direct and personal, with Caroline repeatedly asking follow-up questions about family scenes, relationships, and backlash. 20. Listeners interested in influencer culture, social media pressure, and memoir writing will get the most from it; people wanting a light celebrity chat may skip it.

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