'SNL' newbie deleted 2,000 tweets, including comments about race

Saturday Night Live may have just increased its diversity, but that doesn't mean race is no longer an issue. Less than two weeks after the show announced its first Latina cast member, that comic, Melissa Villaseñor, has been under scrutiny for old offensive tweets she has now deleted.

Villaseñor made her Twitter private just before the official casting announcement from SNL, returning to a public account after deleting some 2,000 tweets. Twitter user @ReignOfApril, however, found and screenshotted several of Villaseñor's tweets before this happened.

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April tags Aura Bogado, a writer who saw how many tweets had been deleted and found it suspicious. Finding problematic old tweets from comedians is very much where we're at in 2016, with similar situations arising with Trevor Noah and others.

"If you’re trying to make a joke, I can try and critique the joke if I think that it merits a critique, but those kinds of statements are essentially saying, ‘I’m scared to go on a date with a black man,'" Bogado told Buzzfeed. "I don’t find it humorous and honestly, with some of those tweets, maybe not all of them, but those two in particular, I don’t think it was meant to be funny. I think she was just indicating her sentiment — her problematic sentiment.”

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A rep for the comedian did not immediately return a request for comment.