Twitter Bans Mega Troll Milo After He Urged His Fans To Attack Leslie Jones

Tech Crunch – Twitter has permanently suspended Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at the conservative news outlet Breitbart and one of its most notorious trolls.

The expulsion of Yiannopoulos, who counted more than 300,000 followers on the service, comes just one day after he urged on a hateful mob that harassed ‘Ghostbusters’ actress Leslie Jones to the point that she quit Twitter.

Jones received a barrage sexist and racist messages from users, including fake messages made to look like they came from her account. With little way to fight back, she decided to quit the service on Monday “with tears and a very sad heart.” 

This is far from the first time that Yiannopoulos has courted controversy on Twitter. He became a driving force in GamerGate, which vaulted him to cult future status on certain parts of the internet. He then lost his verification badge, which Twitter typically gives to members of the media and celebrities, in January, which only seemed to amp up his interest in offending Twitter’s management and many who use the service.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Twitter said:

People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others. Over the past 48 hours in particular, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.

We know many people believe we have not done enough to curb this type of behavior on Twitter. We agree. We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders. We have been in the process of reviewing our hateful conduct policy to prohibit additional types of abusive behavior and allow more types of reporting, with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted. We’ll provide more details on those changes in the coming weeks.

TechCrunch reached out to Yiannopoulous, but we did not hear back. Yiannopoulos did release a comment via Breibart:

With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives.

Twitter is holding me responsible for the actions of fans and trolls using the special pretzel logic of the left. Where are the Twitter police when Justin Bieber’s fans cut themselves on his behalf?

Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot.

This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.

Big hubbub on Twitter following the Leslie Jones fiasco as this dude Milo got the boot. Full disclosure for this blog – I have no idea who Milo is and I’ve never seen him in action on Twitter so I’m really just shooting from the hip on this one. Hot takes only from here on out.

On the one hand, as someone who has to deal with people blaming me for the actions and words of my followers, I gotta side with this guy. We’ve been accused of this “weaponizing” bullshit all the time. And every time we have to break it down for people and give a common sense explanation like we’re in 4th grade – we cant be responsible for what other people say on Twitter and in comment sections or any other platform. Plain and simple. Thats not a cop out. Thats not us being irresponsible. Thats just an irrefutable fact. I cant control strangers I dont know. Do we push the envelope at times? Yes. Of course. But the intent behind any controversial blogs is either to make people laugh, or to simply make a point that we believe in passionately.  There is never any intent to rile up the small, vocal minority of idiotic Barstool readers. As a matter of fact, everyone here at Barstool hates that. When we write a blog or send a tweet making a valid and strong argument against a feminist and some of our readers chime in and call her a Seaward and play right into her tired, stale rhetoric, its infuriating. Because in the internet’s eyes, those idiotic fans are proving them “right.” Not only do we not encourage readers to attack anyone, we absolutely hate when they do it on their own. Particularly because they arent good at it. They lack humor and subtlety and end up being hateful instead of articulating their point. If I could get that small sect of readers to leave the internet feuds to the actual bloggers, I’d be ecstatic.

And I think thats the other side of the coin and the differentiator in this story and this guy Milo. Again for the record I cant speak concretely on this because I’ve never seen him in action, but it sounds to me like this guy intentionally encourages that behavior. I hate the PC culture and feminists but we address it in very different ways. I write a blog, crack some jokes, hopefully make some people laugh, stand up for what I believe in, and thats that. I welcome any back and forth banter or battle from the person involved in the story but I’ll never intentionally sic Stoolies on anyone. And most times we dont start fights, we finish them. Except for the time I told that chick The Rock would turn her kid sideways and shove him up her candy ass. That was me being a dick and going after her when she hadn’t said anything about Barstool first. That one I own up to. But even that was for the sake of humor and a throwback reference to the WWF Attitude Era which always kills in my book. Its not like I said “Hey everyone lets verbally assault this woman! She deserves it!” I also cant STAND people who just yell “Freedom of speech!” when this shit pops up. You dont get to just be a total cocksucker and then yell “Freedom of speech!” The First Amendment is there to allow people to practice religion and speak out for important matters. Not for you to tweet pictures of Leslie Jones with cum on her face because you dont like the new Ghostbusters, you fucking dickheads. The First Amendment protects you from not being arrested by the government. The First Amendment has nothing to do with you getting kicked off of a social media platform because their Terms and Conditions you signed up for blatantly says dont engage in hate speech and you’re doing exactly that. So, it sounds like this dude is just a glorified internet commenter and I really dont have any sympathy for a guy like that being eliminated.

BUT…ALL that being said, I ultimately side with this dude because I dont think you can ban people for just being a cocksucker. Thats like 90% of people on the internet. His point about how there are Islamic extremists allowed on Twitter literally preaching that you should kill people and he’s now banned for making fun of Leslie Jones is a valid one. Thats ridiculous. I guess the TL;DR version is the famous Melenia Trump quote “I may not agree with what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” But I just dont want people automatically comparing sites like us to trolls like him. Theres a very important distinction between the way we do things and the way he does things. Hes a troll but I think trolls deserve to be on Twitter like anyone else. I dont think Twitter is a safe space. If you want to play in the mud you’re going to get dirty. If you’re gonna swim in the deep end you might go underwater. When you login to Twitter you gotta take the good with the bad. Leslie Jones chose to leave Twitter because of the assholes. Can’t blame her. But Twitter will never be able to remove all the assholes and its a slippery slope if they get to decide who’s too big of an asshole and who’s not. So I guess I begrudgingly gotta say, Free Milo.