(GeekWire) A professor whose tweet about Queen Elizabeth II was called out by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others, has been rebuked by the university where she works.
Dr. Uju Anya, a professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University, tweeted Thursday when news reports initially said the queen was in grave condition.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya said.
On a day when social media was dominated by strong reactions to the death of the British monarch — from world leaders to random brands in the U.S. — Bezos tweeted his own displeasure at Anya’s sentiment.
This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow. https://t.co/2zoi6CdFMq
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) September 8, 2022
She shot back at the former Amazon CEO in his replies, writing, “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”
It wasn’t the first time Anya had mixed it up, in an indirect way, with Bezos. In August she tweeted a picture of herself with Chris Smalls, the union organizer in New York who led the first organized labor victory at an Amazon warehouse facility.
Twitter ended up deleting Anya’s original tweet about the queen for violating the company’s rules.
And later Thursday, Carnegie Mellon issued a statement about the professor’s posts, saying that the university did “not condone the offensive and objectionable messages.”
A statement regarding recent social media posts by Uju Anya. pic.twitter.com/NinpPa4rZg
— Carnegie Mellon University (@CarnegieMellon) September 8, 2022
