Lady Gaga wants her Little Monsters to stand down.
“Sending threats of any kind, using hateful or abusive language, and the provoking of others on the internet is not supported by me or anything that I stand for,” she wrote in an open letter on her Born This Way Foundation’s blog. “What I’ve seen transpiring is wrong and upsetting to me, and I’ve made it very clear how I feel about equality and compassion.”
She went on to empathize with her fans’ anger over material written or said about Gaga, but guided them toward “the change toward positivity.”
“Music is about love, and is about sharing in the magic of theater,” she continued. “We are stronger than this. We know what we stand for, and what we stand for is bravery. I know this because what I see on the internet is not what I see at my shows.”
Gaga also called for Twitter and other social media services to step in to police abusive users.
“I don’t know that I am powerful enough to stop it myself,” she said.
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The letter comes after an intense round of Twitter feuding between Gaga and former friend and gossip blogger Perez Hilton. Gaga accused Hilton of stalking her; Hilton claimed his house-hunting in her building was a coincidence, but by then he’d received death threats and other verbal assaults from apparent Gaga supporters on Twitter. Hilton is not mentioned in Gaga’s letter.
“If her fans want to send a message of support to Lady GaGa, they should buy her music,” Hilton said in a statement. The pop star’s “Applause,” the first single from “ARTPOP,” is expected to sell around 200,000 to 225,000 downloads in its debut week.
The official Nielsen SoundScan sales figures for the song will be announced on Wednesday, Aug. 21.
Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, co-founded with her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, is aimed at youth outreach and has become an integral part of her pop career: it offered mental health services via the Born Brave Bus alongside Gaga’s prematurely concluded Born This Way Ball tour.