Keke Palmer’s Kylie Jenner Comments Make An Unfair Assumption

Scream Queens actor Keke Palmer recently opened up about social media to Yahoo! in an interview that felt spot on about how cultivating a brand for yourself online can erode your soul. But in the interview, Palmer also made comments about Kylie Jenner that occupied more of a gray area. By citing the reality television star as her prime example of how social media can encourage users to be their most inauthentic self, it felt like the actor had made one big assumption: that Jenner's physical presentation and her posts online aren't representative of who she truly is. And really, how would anyone but Jenner herself and those close to her know that?

Palmer cited the 19-year-old as an example of someone who had responded to their critics by being "so damn perfect they have nothing to say." She suggested that the model may have been inspired to transform herself by appearing on television when she was just a child and having audiences tell her she was "the ugly person in the family." Palmer stated, "She went and did apparently everything the world deems as beautiful. The even crazier part is that everybody loves her for it."

She continued:

"What I find interesting is that this is something that is being displayed to my generation — showing young girls, young guys that if you do everything that society wants you to be, not only will you be praised for it but you will make money for it. You can be profitable for not being who you truly are."

While Palmer makes some good points about the pressure people often feel from society to look or act a certain way, bringing Jenner's appearance into the debate doesn't help matters, because who can know what prompted her decision to get lip filters or experiment with makeup or dress a certain way? The star has never cited her critics as the reason she presents herself the way she does — potentially, this is just Jenner doing Jenner.

Similarly, just because the youngest Kardashian-Jenner daughter doesn't, as Palmer states she herself does, express "everything [she's] going through — whether that’s sadness, happiness, depression, anger, boredom, whatever it may be" doesn't make her social media presence inauthentic. Perhaps it's true to her own code of how she operates online and the cosmetics entrepreneur just isn't that comfy letting strangers know everything she's feeling on a daily basis. Which isn't to invalidate Palmer's own way of operating on the internet — if she feels good sharing how she's feeling, more power to her.

And it's not as if Jenner herself has never opened up about who she is. When asked by Khloé Kardashian who "the real Kylie Jenner is" on a Snapchat conversation, she replied, “The real Kylie Jenner is sensitive, weird and I don’t know, I love really hard." And while Jenner might not share her feelings openly with fans too often it sounds like that is going to change soon. In the teaser for her docu-series Life Of Kylie, which premieres in August, she says, "When you grow up on camera, everybody feels like they know you, but they don't."

So sure, it's great that Palmer is reminding her fans of the importance of not taking other people's social media too seriously and is promoting people being themselves, but that doesn't mean any assumptions need to be made about who exactly is and isn't already doing that.