Shine OnTeen’s innocent Twitter comment results in death threats
We are only a few days into 2014, but the world has already witnessed one of the most over-the-top online Twitter dramas of the year.
At 11 p.m. on New Year's Eve, 17-year-old Safiyyah Nawaz of North Carolina tweeted the following:
"This beautiful earth is now officially 2014 years old. Amazing."
The reaction to what she claims was a joke is astounding and downright horrifying.
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"Kill yourself you stupid motherf----r" tweeted one user (the tweet has since been removed).
"This b---h just said 'the earth is 2014 years old' #really #dumbbitch #youstupid," tweets another.
Along with the insults and death threats, her tweet has been retweeted more than 15,000 times, mostly by haters calling her dumb because they assume she doesn't know the earth is actually 4.54 billion years old.
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Yet Nawaz appears to be taking the whole thing in stride, firing back a level-headed and mature reaction.
“People on the internet will say things and you won’t ever be able to stop them,” she tells Buzzfeed. “They’ll say bad things to you, terrible things to you -- racist, sexist, discriminatory -- but those are not people that matter.”
The jokester did take the opportunity to fire back at her haters by tweeting a follow-up joke to her growing Twitter audience -- prior to the tweet she says she had about 100 followers, but has since grown to more than 4,500.
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"Id like to take this opportunity to announce that Im running for presidency in the year 2036, hopefully with snoop lion as my vp," she joked in a tweet two hours later.
The teen has even started to use her new-found Twitter fame as a platform to promote social justice causes.
"To help combat poverty and injustice worldwide, please donate to Oxfam America!" she tweets with a link to a donation page.
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Her strategy is probably for the best, considering the negative tweets continued to be directed at her even after she changed her Twitter bio to reflect that she indeed knows how old the earth is.
"I GET IT THE EARTH IS APPROX 4.54 BILLION YEARS OLD IT WAS A JOKE"
