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After years of provocation, Twitter has permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos from its service.
Yiannopoulos, who currently serves as Breitbart.com’s tech editor, has been hailed as a standout voice of the new “alt-right” movement. As such, he has made a living as a provocateur, continually inflaming tensions between progressive branches of the internet focused on identity politics and the fervently anti-PC segment that constantly trolls it. For years, Yiannopoulous has used Twitter not only to voice his controversial opinions, but to direct his legion of followers (388,042 at the time of this writing) 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 verification.
But this week he went far. 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.
If at first you don’t succeed (because your work is terrible), play the victim. EVERYONE GETS HATE MAIL FFS https://t.co/W572qB4Vqw
— Milo Yiannopoulos ã²â?? (@Nero)
Barely literate. America needs better schools! https://t.co/cCAEI5Ks7w
— Milo Yiannopoulos ã²â?? (@Nero)
According to the company, the 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.
Here’s the statement, according to a Twitter spokesperson:
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.
Yiannopoulos was not available for comment at the time of publication.
R/T BuzzFeed
The post Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos Account appeared first on We Are Change.
from We Are Change http://wearechange.org/milo-yiannopoulos-twitter/
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