Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Twitter has banned one of its most notoriously contentious voices. On Tuesday evening, the microblogging service permanently suspended the account of conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, a day after he incited his followers to bombard Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist and demeaning tweets.
“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “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.”
Yiannopoulos, who currently serves as Breitbart’s tech editor, has been hailed as a voice of the new “alt-right” movement. As such, he has made a living as a provocateur, continually inflaming tensions, focused on identity politics and the fervently anti-PC segment that constantly trolls.
For years, Yiannopoulous has used Twitter not only to voice his controversial opinions, but to direct his followers toward his opponents. As a result, he’s been temporarily banned from Twitter a number of times for violating its terms of service and stripped of his verified status.
But this week he went too far. Yiannopoulos led the harassment campaign against Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones with a barrage of tweets, which decried Jones for being black and a woman.
Yiannopoulos’s permanent suspension isn’t a matter of speech as much as a matter of behavior — specifically, a violation of Twitter’s rules regarding the targeted abuse of specific users.
Yiannopoulos responded via his employer’s site, Breitbart.com, calling Twitter’s permanent suspension “cowardly”:
“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."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo?utm_term=.jaMw8vxzQ#.gsZVoNbJX