Twitter Bars Milo Yiannopoulos in Wake of Leslie Jones’s Reports of Abuse
This is unprecedented because it’s the first time Twitter has banned the account of a major public figure for alleged ‘TOS violations’. Usually it’s ‘one strike and you’re out’ for accounts with fewer than 10,000 followers, whereas much bigger accounts have a lot more leniency. And celebrities can do anything they want, proving that not all users are equal under the TOS, as if that is a surprise.
Ms. Jones in particular has borne the brunt of the online abuse in recent days, especially since the release of “Ghostbusters” in the United States on Friday. Hundreds of anonymous Twitter commenters hurled racist and sexist remarks at the star’s Twitter account, rallied and directed by Mr. Yiannopoulos this week.
This seems to imply Milo actually dispatched these ‘mobs’ against her, which given the bias of the NYT, is probably false.
All over the internet, and especially on Twitter and Reddit, people are rallying in support of Milo.
In a brief interview on Tuesday evening, Mr. Yiannopoulos said, “This is the beginning of the end for Twitter.”
“Some people are going to find this perfectly acceptable,” he said. “Anyone who believes in free speech or is a conservative certainly will not.”
The problem is Twitter is not a platform for ‘free speech’. Their TOS gives them the right to ban accounts for any reason. Same for Facebook, Instagram, Blogger, Gmail, and others.
My advice if you have a huge twitter account: dial it down. Getting banned and losing all the followers you spent years accumulating is never worth it.
Vox has their own spin: Milo Yiannopoulos’s Twitter ban, explained
n 2014, Gamergate — the anti-feminist harassment movement that surfaced in gaming culture and spread into larger internet culture — also fought against many gaming franchises that sought to be more diverse.
Hmmm….mean comments on the internet, versus actual physical assault against Trump supporters.
Or that Leslie Jones has a history of racist tweets against white people.
Since then, the movement has effectively become a cornerstone of the alt-right, and still continues to influence everything from the presidential election to major tech conferences. It overlaps with large swaths of 4chan, men’s rights activism, the online atheist movement, pickup artist culture, Reddit, and Tumblr.
So now it’s atheism too…because Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris acknowledge the enemy of western civilization is not Christianity but Islamic terror.
Though multiple attempts have been made to paint the Ghostbusters backlash as a product of what is perceived (largely inaccurately) as a more general trend of fan entitlement,
According to the left, criticism of a shitty movie and its actresses becomes racism. The left thinks they can impose their values on society, and no one is allowed to push back? The Vox article goes on and on. The author, Aja Romano, who is a ‘Web Culture Reporter’ obviously abdicated any journalistic integrity as a ‘reporter’ in her obviously biased coverage, but this is not too surprising either.
Finally, some decent reporting: The Verge questions Twitter’s Orwellian ‘anti-harassment system’. This is similar to the equally arbitrary and draconian YouTube ‘copyright’ rules, which are often invoked not to protect legitimate copyright claims but to suppress content.