The Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj Twitter FEUD extremely stressful, Taylor Swift sent an emotionally wounded retort to fellow acclaimed pop star Nicki Minaj.

Late Tuesday afternoon, acclaimed pop star Taylor Swift sent an emotionally wounded retort to fellow acclaimed pop star Nicki Minaj. Swift was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Video, while Minaj was not. Swift thought Minaj was unfairly directing blame for the snub at her, when Minaj should really be blaming one of the men nominated for said award

Naturally, since this is 2015, Swift launched her reply on Twitter, where everybody could see it.

@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..

It was just the latest development in a long, unfolding saga that ended up involving people with very, very carefully sculpted images behaving like, well, human beings on social media, and learning a lesson all parents should tell their children when tucking them in at night: No matter what it is, never tweet.

The MTV Video Music Awards are now primarily known in the public consciousness as a platform for unusually bananas musical performances. (It’s where, for instance, Miley Cyrus twerked and launched a million think pieces.) But like music’s other big awards — the Grammys — those performances are just there so you’ll watch while awards are handed out, and even if the audience doesn’t particularly care who wins, the artists very much do.

Minaj’s video for “Anaconda,” a riotous, gleeful celebration (and satirization) of female sexuality, was by far one of the biggest videos of the year. Essentially everything Swift touches nowadays turns to gold. It made sense to assume they would both be nominated.

Except that Minaj — who did receive three other VMA nominations in lower ballot categories — was passed over, while Swift was nominated for the overstuffed, overhyped “Bad Blood” video, filled with celebrity cameos and a far cry from essentially any other music video she released in the past year:

Here were the five nominees MTV arrived at:

Beyoncé – “7/11″
Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”
Taylor Swift ft. Kendrick Lamar – “Bad Blood”
Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars – “Uptown Funk”
Kendrick Lamar – “Alright”

In terms of sheer artistic impact, this is a pretty weak crop. (Arguably, “Uptown Funk” is the one that’s had the most cultural reach, and that’s a pretty bland video.) It’s hard to see why “Anaconda” doesn’t belong on the list, and Minaj felt similarly.

Part of the problem with discussing these things on Twitter is that Twitter’s very format invites misinterpretation. Limited character counts lend themselves to people getting the wrong idea.

So it’s easy to see why Swift assumed Minaj’s tweet referred to her — “Bad Blood” is, after all, the video by a woman in that category that broke records and impacted culture. It also prominently features a number of women with “very slim bodies”: not just Swift but Selena Gomez, Karlie Kloss, Cara Delevingne, and Jessica Alba, to name a few.

But Minaj frequently discusses the ways hat white culture appropriates and homogenizes black culture in the course of making it “popular.” She could have just as easily been talking about, say, her longtime target Iggy Azalea, whose “Fancy” was a nominee last year. Her target, under this argument, is the VMAs and MTV as institutions.

For her part, Minaj said Swift wasn’t on her mind at all:

The Swift kerfuffle distracts from Minaj’s larger point, which is that the artistic achievements of black people — particularly black women — are frequently co-opted and commodified by white culture, which is then celebrated for being edgy or groundbreaking. When you view Minaj’s tweets in this context, it seems much more likely that she simply wasn’t even thinking about Swift when she wrote her tweets.

But by trying to shift the conversation from racism to sexism, Swift misses Minaj’s point as well.