Maybe you woke up today and something felt…off. If you try going to Azealia Banks’ Twitter account, you will now be met with:
Yes, while formerly you would have been showered in a lot of opinions, some valid, some nauseating, some trolling, some homophobic, some racist, some God knows what else — and many unfortunately getting in the way of what long ago looked to be an awesome career — now, you are met with silence and the instructions to return to your own timeline, because there’s nothing to see here. After the rapper’s viciously racist attack on Zayn Malick via Twitter (when then escalated into an attack on 14-year-old Skai Jackson, from which the teenager emerged victorious), it was reported yesterday that Banks had been dropped as a headliner from the Rinse FM Born & Bred Festival in London.
And now a far more vastly influential (albeit virtual) space has decided not provide her with a platform. Despite having issued an apology about her earlier Tweets (saying, for example, that she believed she was speaking Jackson’s mother, and apologizing for the way her comments were perceived rather than apologizing to her “targets” themselves), it seems Twitter has, at least for the moment, cut her off.
When contacted by Billboard, the company said, “we do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons” — but any attempted trip to Banks’ Twitter page will bring up the same result. The publication also noted that Twitter and the Born & Bred Festival could just be the beginning; England’s Home Office wrote vaguely to NME, when rumor broke in tabloids that the British governmental department was considering whether or not she should be let into England at all:
Coming to the U.K. is a privilege, and we expect those who come here to respect our shared values. The Home Secretary has the power to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the U.K. is not conducive to the public good or if their exclusion is justified on public policy grounds.