Twitter has removed a tweet by an applied linguistics professor who wished a painful death upon the late Queen Elizabeth II. “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” Carnegie Melon Professor Uju Anya wrote. “May her pain be excruciating.” The site is in a maelstrom following the sovereign’s death, as some people from Britain’s former colonies, like Ghana and Ireland, celebrate the end of the queen’s 70-year reign. Meanwhile, other users are calling for more sensitivity and respect toward the recently deceased, including Amazon CEO and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, who rebuffed the professor’s comment, asking: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.” Anya doubled down with an explanatory addition to her now-deleted punch at the queen, saying she won’t “express anything but disdain” for the monarch after she supervised and sponsored genocide “that massacred and displaced half my family.”
