Jameela Jamil responds to backlash after quitting Twitter over Elon Musk purchase

‘This is a move towards (esp straight male) white entitlement,’ said the actor of the response to her leaving Twitter

Jameela Jamil has spoken out about the responses she has received from “angry white men” after choosing to leave Twitter over Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform.

Tesla billionaire Musk purchased the platform on Monday (25 April) for about $44bn (£34.5bn).

Soon after this news broke, former The Good Place star Jamil announced that she’d no longer be using the social media site.

Giving reasons for her departure, she stated her belief that the platform would “reach its final form of totally lawless hate” under Musk’s ownership.

Since the announcement, the actor claims to have received “wild” direct messages from people criticising her choice.

Sharing a screenshot of her final tweet, Jamil addressed the backlash on Instagram on Tuesday (26 April).

“I said this and then left, after Elon bought Twitter, and some angry white men are seemingly quite upset,” she began, before sharing that some of the messages called her a “dumb b***h” and told her they wanted to kill her.

“I don’t want a freedom of hate speech because it is detrimental to the freedom of speech of the oppressed as they face such horrific and scary real life consequences for objecting to their oppression,” she wrote.

“This is a move towards (esp straight male) white entitlement. Nobody else is safe there if they do not think the already HORRIFYING vitriol on that app is enough ‘freedom’.”

The actor then shared her fears that the site was “about to become The Purge and some sort of crypto bro fever dream”, then stated she’d prefer to protect her sanity and spend time with her dog, Barold.

Concluding her message, she attributed the abusive messages she’d received as examples of what she believed Twitter would look like in the future.

“Sign of what’s to come on there eh? Let the angry boys have their toy,” she wrote.

“Once there is nobody there to make bigoted jokes about, or to oppress or threaten to rape, they will fizzle out and go back to Reddit where they came from.”