‘I got 500 offensive emails in five minutes’ — Uju Anya recounts backlash after Jeff Bezos’ tweet

Uju Anya, a lecturer at the Carnegie Mellon University, USA, has recounted the backlash she received after Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, reacted to her remarks regarding Queen Elizabeth II of England.

A few hours before the Queen’s death, Anya had criticised the late monarch in a series of tweets and wished her “excruciating pain”.

The Nigerian-born academic had accused the late monarch of sponsoring the “genocide” that led to her family being displaced.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” the now-deleted tweets read in part.

Her tweets generated thousands of mixed reactions. While many people condemned her, others agreed with what she wrote.

Bezos was one of those who reacted to Anya’s tweets.

“This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow,” he tweeted.

Recounting the events that transpired, on 1hood media, Anya said Bezos’ reaction to her tweet was an attack on her, not her words.

“Jeff Bezos came at me and exposed me to threats, to danger, put a target on my back for his 5 million followers. If you can think of the influence he has, a single tweet of his can leave millions of impressions. His influence is out of worldly and he put my tweet there with my words, my picture, in the middle of a storm already brewing against me,” she said.

“I have 500 emails in my inbox within five minutes. I had to disable the contact button on my website because people were coming in there calling me everything but my given name. I didn’t open any of those emails but they put it already on the subject line — ‘Nigga’, ‘cunt’, ‘bitch’, ‘genetically inferior’, I heard all kinds of things. Jeff Bezos did that. He didn’t criticize my words, he criticized me.

“He said that I was not contributing anything to make the world better. I came back and said to him exactly what I thought of him. First of all, I cursed him in my father’s language, and secondly, I reminded him that he was a colonizer like that queen and that the millions of people that he has harmed in this world, including his employees, will remember him just as fondly as I do my colonizers.”