Safiyyah Nawaz experienced the ugly side of Twitter this week when a joke of hers ended up getting over 14,000 retweets.
On Dec. 31 at 11 p.m., Safiyyah Nawaz, a 17-year-old from North Carolina, tweeted what she thought was a really random joke. She was sitting on the couch with her brother waiting for the New Year's ball to drop when a silly thought popped up in her head.
"We were just hanging out. And right before I sent that tweet I wrote it in my phone and showed it to my brother," She said via a phone interview. "And I said 'I think I'm going to tweet this,' and he said, 'okay Safiyyah.' And then I sent it out."
And that's when people got angry. As of publication time, Safiyyah's joke about the age of the Earth has been retweeted 14,789 times.
Safiyyah's Twitter account was fairly small before her New Year's tweet. Going through her timeline, it was mostly silly jokes, conversations with friends, and funny pictures.
"I tweet weird stuff a lot, I guess," Safiyyah said. "I had like a hundred followers, just my close friends."
Once her tweet went out though, her relatively small account was brought to the attention of the rest of Twitter. It was passed from user to user entirely by word-of-mouth. She says the response from angry Twitter users was almost immediate.
