Internet provocateur and Breitbart News tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos has amassed a large following on the social media site Twitter, using it to promote himself and the alt-right movement he covered. Yiannopoulos is known for attention-grabbing tweets and his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” of college campuses designed to elicit negative responses from college progressives. Now Twitter has had enough of what they deem to be “harassment,” particularly of “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones, and suspended Yiannopoulos from their site permanently.
Buzzfeed reports, “This week, Yiannopoulos led a harassment campaign against Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones, which led to the SNL cast member’s decision to leave Twitter. The tweets, many of which targeted Jones for being black and a woman, were the final straw for Twitter, which is taking steps to try to solve its harassment problem.”
A statement from Twitter on the ban reads:
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