Twitter Just Permanently Suspended Milo Yiannopoulos

Posted by Jason TateJul 19, 2016

Charlie Warzel, at Buzzfeed:

According to Twitter, it was Yiannopoulos who led the harassment campaign against Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones that inspired 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.

About-fucking-time.

Statement from Twitter

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.