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Lena Dunham leaves Twitter, launches 'snark-free' newsletter

Comedians Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner launched a feminist newsletter that they hope prevents the type of verbal abuse Dunham has received on Twitter.

Comedian Lena Dunham says she is done with Twitter.

The co-creator of HBO's "Girls," said she didn’t want to see the verbal abuse she was receiving. While someone else tweets for her through her account, she is not spending time on the social media platform.

“I still like the format as just a way to express ideas, and I really appreciate that anybody follows me at all,” she said in a podcast interview on Monday. “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 and Jenni Konner, her partner in the creation of "Girls," launched a newsletter publication this week that attempts to avoid the kind of violent responses Dunham has experienced. The newsletter, Lenny Letter, is comprised of interviews, columns and personal essays about feminism, style, health, politics and other topics.

Related: Clinton to Dunham: 'If you can’t get excited, be pragmatic'

The two said what will make it different is its lack of snark and that it won’t allow comments. The goal is to allow others to speak in “an unfiltered way about what it means to be a female right now,” Dunham said.

The most recent degrading comments Dunham has received were in response to an Instagram picture of herself wearing her boyfriend’s boxers.

“It wasn’t a graphic picture,” she said. “And it turned into rabid, disgusting debate about women’s bodies and my Instagram page was somehow the hub for misogynists for the afternoon.”

She added that she was concerned about the teenage girls who go to her page.

“I don't want them seeing a picture of me in my boyfriend's boxers and then be told I'm obese and anyone who looks like me is repulsive and I deserve to be dragged around and smacked," she said.

Dunham said there is a fine line between between when tweets are verbal abuse and when people are just speaking their minds.

“There are marked incidences of girls committing suicide after massive Twitter bullying,” Dunham said. “How do you rectify that with wanting to have a community where people are free to speak? It’s really complicated.”

She said she has spoken with the people at Twitter in the past about blocking people, but at the end of the day, she would rather not know the negative comments people are directing at her.

Earlier in the interview, Dunham and Konner discussed how successful many comedians have been on Twitter, including Konner.

Dunham says she still checks out Konner’s and a few other people’s pages, but she doesn’t even have the password to her own Twitter anymore.