Hawzah News Agency-Stanford junior Tesay Yusuf and her friends were cheering for the camera at a Cardinal football game recently, but when the image ended up in an advertisement for football tickets on a Stanford Facebook page it turned into a target of hateful remarks. Along with her Cardinal red shirt, Yusuf was wearing a hijab.

Disgusted, she took to social media herself.

“When @Stanford Athletics posts ONE diverse ad of me and my friends at a football game, all hell breaks loose,” Yusuf tweeted over the weekend, including a screenshot of some of the comments.

She wasn’t exaggerating. Stanford removed “direct threats” to Yusuf as well as other hate speech posted in response to the ad, said university spokeswoman Lisa Lapin.

Born in the U.S. to Ethiopian immigrant parents, Yusuf said she was not surprised by the commentary and initially brushed it off, but that she took a stand over the weekend after seeing that the comments continued.

Her post was retweeted nearly 8,000 times, with many people expressing their disgust at the treatment she received.

“HELLLLLL NO. This is totally unacceptable. They need to be hauled off of Facebook and planet earth,” one person wrote in support of Yusuf.

Yusuf said she thinks her message resonated with people who were shocked that a simple image of students cheering for their team could become fodder for racist commentary — and that the comments were made so openly.

“People are feeling more comfortable saying these kinds of things,” she said, noting that Facebook is not an anonymous forum. “People feel like it’s OK to be blatantly bigoted.”

Lapin said Stanford “stands behind” Yusuf and that the student did not want the photo to be altered or removed.

“Everybody’s very proud of the way the students are conducting themselves and the courage of this particular student,” Lapin said. “In a way this has united the community, certainly here.”

Yusuf said she hopes her stand will inspire others to be “anti-racist” — to push back against racism and bigotry — especially in a tense political climate.

“These kinds of things shouldn’t be ignored anymore,” she said.