Nicki Minaj attends The 2019 Met Gala Celebrating Camp: Notes on Fashion at Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 06, 2019 in New York City. (Dia Dipasupil/FilmMagic)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
But a spokesperson for Twitter told VICE News that the company “did not take any enforcement action on the account referenced.”While the initial tweet about swollen testicles may have been seen as a joke, the fallout has turned nasty, with right-wing figures accusing liberals of trying to silence a Black woman just because she is voicing an opinion.Minaj, in her late night Instagram video on Wednesday, claimed that people were trying to “assassinate my character and make me look crazy or stupid.” She also suggested that there was some sort of orchestrated campaign against her by an unnamed group, and key to this was the fact that one of the first people to “attack” her about this, MSNBC host Joy Reid, was a Black woman.“They had to make sure it came from a Black person first, because if it came from a white person, the Black people would be like, you're racist,” Minaj said.Many conservative figures jumped to Minaj’s defence including Fox News Host Tucker Carlson and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who painted the situation as another example of the left “dictating” to anyone who doesn’t agree with them.“[They] are trying to dictate to Nicki Minaj what she can and can't say, who she is and isn't permitted to cite, what partisan box she must stay in,” Greenwald tweeted.When it was pointed out to Greenwald that Minaj had not in fact been censored by Twitter, he claimed: “If she wasn't banned, it's only because of who she is, not because anyone else would be allowed to say this.”Carlson has covered the story for two nights on his show and on Wednesday, said that the controversy is not about a singer talking about a man’s swollen testicles, but “it’s the last part of Nicki Minaj’s tweet that enrages them, the part where she says you should ‘pray on it, make the decision yourself like a free human being and ‘don’t be bullied.’ So our media and public health officials didn’t like this because they make their livings bullying people, so they couldn’t let it stand.”Minaj responded to the segment with a tweet consisting of a bullseye emoji, then echoed these sentiments in her Instagram video, claiming that most celebrities are afraid to speak out about these types of controversial subjects exactly because of the type of backlash she was facing. Minaj added that her hesitancy to get vaccinated as a widespread opinion among entertainers: “80% of the artists that y’all following right now feel like I feel about the vaccine, and are too afraid to speak on it.”