Milo joins the Brighton Grammar Two
Famous Twitter harasser Milo Yiannopoulos has finally been banned altogether from the social platform that made him internet-famous. It’s about time. The guy has built a career (however shoddy) on sadistically torturing people via Twitter.
Twitter has permanently banned a rightwing writer and notorious troll for his role in the online abuse of Leslie Jones over her role in the Ghostbusters reboot.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.
A known contrarian who likened rape culture to Harry Potter (“both fantasy”) and affectionately referred to Donald Trump as “daddy”, he emerged as a spokesman for the “alt-right” in the wake of the Gamergate movement.
“Contrarian” is a stupid word for what he does. Contrary to what? It’s not as if misogyny is an obscure or minority outlook. I suppose he’s “contrarian” in the sense that the “orthodox” view is that we shouldn’t bully strangers on social media for giggles.
Yiannopolous told Breitbart.com his suspension was “cowardly”, and evidence that Twitter was a “no-go zone for conservatives”.
“Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot.
“This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.”
Blah blah blah blah. Mommy interfered with his free speech when she told him not to be rude to his classmates, people on the street, people in shops, people on the bus, dinner guests.
Here’s the thing, Milo: free speech is about public discourse and substantive disagreement and minority opinion. It is not an ironclad rule that everyone should be as rude as possible at all times in all situations and all media. It’s not a law that protects your right to harass people. Free speech doesn’t extend to harassment.
On Monday, Jones had started publicising some of the abuse she had received on the platform, much of it singling her out for being black and a woman.
After she made public pleas for Twitter to intervene, its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, asked her to make contact late on Monday night.
But she later appeared to quit the platform “with tears and a very sad heart”.
So Milo jeered at her for being a victim.
A spokesman for Twitter said in a statement that “permanent suspension” was one of a number of steps that had been taken to address the uptick in offending accounts since Jones began rallying against her abusers.
“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.”
In theory they do, but in practice Twitter almost never enforces those rules. Milo is the exception, not the rule.
The statement also addressed criticisms that the platform does not go far enough to protect its users, particularly women and people of colour.
“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.”
Nowhere near enough. They get reports on people who harass nonstop for hours every day, and they reply saying “No problem here, sorry not sorry.”
A review of Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy” was under way and would prohibit more types of abusive behaviour as well as allow more forms of reporting, “with the goal of reducing the burden on the person being targeted”.
More details on those changes were due in the coming weeks, said the spokesman.
They’ve said that before. It didn’t happen.
I suppose we should be glad they took action this once; that campaign was really ugly. And no one deserved it more than Milo. Still, it’s like throwing a cup of water on a four-alarm fire.
I’m indifferent. I know little about the tweets aimed at Jones, but I do know that no one has a ‘right’ not to be insulted or offended.
Tweets calling threatening violence or the death of people should be banned and those making them barred for life.
Have the accounts of those calling for the deaths of policemen been shut down? Some people CLAIMING to be members of BLM have been doing just that.
It’s easy to be indifferent when you’ve never been the target of sadists on Twitter.
Or then again maybe it’s not. Maybe it takes actual callousness to say that. Use your imagination and/or some empathy, John, or else shut the fuck up about it. If you’ve never been systematically relentlessly harassed on Twitter then don’t dismiss it.
From a systems standpoint, designing an effective anti-harassment infrastructure is not trivial, at least if you care about preventing the harassers from using that system to harass others (see: Facebook). Even the most well-intentioned company can have its staff and its automated systems overwhelmed in relatively short order, because there are thousands—maybe millions—of assholes willing to do just that, as they’ve shown over and over and over again.
Employing genetic algorithms to fisk post content for certain key words and phrases might help, but that could just as easily wind up targeting anti-harassment campaigners (or victims complaining about their own harassment) as it could harassers themselves. And any policy or system requires having the right kinds of people overseeing it, ones who are more sympathetic to the victims than to the mob.
Ultimately these are social problems, not technological ones, and technological solutions can only be effective inasmuch as they facilitate pro-social change (or at least fail to facilitate anti-social behaviour). Getting police and employers to take harassment seriously is probably going to be more effective than anything Twitter can do, even if Twitter really does want to do something (and there is precious little evidence that Twitter wants to do anything other than protect its image, even in this case).
Yiannopoulos is a misogynistic bully who systematically unleashed his hordes of sycophantic under-bullies against any woman who dared to have an opinion about so-called “ethics in gaming journalism” (and a few men, too). You sure as hell wouldn’t be “indifferent” if your twitter notifications blew up with 10,000 mentions overnight involving some of the most vile & violent language imaginable, John. This wasn’t a matter of one person on the internet calling another a silly doody-head once upon a time. Twitter is the festering cesspool that it is today because of people like Yiannopoulos, and I know many people who have deactivated their accounts there for that reason—-myself among them. As such, he and people like him are actively bad for whatever business twitter has, since driving customers away is generally considered to be a bad thing.
[…] moral bankruptcy de nos jours – a comment right here on my post about Milo Yiannopoulos’s permanent banishment from Twitter […]
You have this the wrong way round, John. People are and should be allowed to say things others disagree with and are offended by. Nobody here is suggesting otherwise.
But people also should and do have the right not to be systematically abused, bullied and hounded off channels of communication.
I don’t believe for a second – not for a second that you can’t see the difference between those two things.
@Seth:
A systems-level view would involve a lot more than technology. A company such as Twitter taking a stand by implementing proper, transparent, accountable, evolvable systems for dealing effectively with harassment might go some way toward promoting social change. It’s not necessarily something that can be achieved solely from the top down.
That can be remedied easily enough.
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/07/19/the-internets-worst-people-have-a-new-woman-to-hate-ghostbusters-star-leslie-jones/
“Godless Spellchecker” is completely clueless here: http://www.gspellchecker.com/2016/07/milo-yiannopoulos-has-been-permanently-banned-from-twitter/#more-4225 (he’s doubling-down on this as a free speech issue too)
PEAK RATIONALITY
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/on-ghostbusters-leslie-jones-and-the-duty-of-twier/
Jerry Coyne joins the fray [more peek rashunalatee]
Ugh. Jerry Coyne’s piece is so clueless. He thinks that if you just never see the Twitter campaign, it’s not a problem. He equates it to emails he gets as a blogger – ignoring the fact that nobody else sees his emails unless he shares them.
Godalmighty. Now I’ve read the godless spellchecker one. People point out to him the hideous fake tweets purporting to come from Leslie Jones that Milo sent and implied he had created – and GS says “it’s my own view that these were intended as a (terrible) joke, rather than a genuine effort to defame.” No it is not just a “joke” and of course it’s an effort to defame! People have done it to me. It does defame. People like Milo who all but live on Twitter know that perfectly well. Milo does all the harm to people he can, on purpose, with malice. He thinks it’s funny, but he’s not merely joking.
Yeah. You can’t incite lots of people to bully and harass by sending a private email to someone you don’t like. The intention is entirely different. The space in which it’s happening is entirely different.
Coyne actually seems to respect Yiannopoulos in some weird way. He seems to see him as a victim.
What happened to you, Jerry? You used to be cool.
Not to mention that Jerry Coyne is very thin-skinned and bans commenters at the drop of a hat. Which is fine, that’s his prerogative on his own site, but it’s hypocritical of him to deny Twitter the same right, or complain about Leslie Jones or anyone else being sensitive.
@screechy:
He defended that in the post by saying that Twitter is qualitatively different to his blog because of its ubiquity and kinda-sorta monopoly. I have some sympathy for that argument but Jerry seems to think Twitter should favour the bullies rather than the bullied. I can’t follow him there.
The fact that it’s a monopoly of the particular thing it does is all the more reason to prevent it from being used as an abuse-tool. I have so many friends who are journalists who have to use it because they’re journalists – which means they have to deal with abuse regularly.
Exactly.
Coyne has to take this position. Remember his defense of his good friend Abbie Smith?
@Lady Mondegreen
Sigh, yeah.
It worries me though. I’m a middle-aged white male with a background in academia. Am I going to suddenly go full Dawkins one day or will I pass through a Coyne period first?
Today is my birthday. The arsehole crystal in my palm might start flashing any minute.
Don’t worry latsot, we’ll send the sandman after you if that happens.
There’s a reason Logan’s Limp didn’t attract hollywood backers.