Twitter ‘Permanently Banned’ Milo Yiannopoulos For Sending Racist, Sexist Trolls After Leslie Jones

Milo Yiannopoulos is a journalist, provocateur, and noted online troll. The outlandish, British tech editor for Breitbart is best known for his incendiary tweets that forced the service to remove his verification and also allegedly also sending followers at specific targets where they attempt to do their worst in 140 characters or less. All of these acts have now seemingly earned him a removal from Twitter.

His ejection from Twitter reportedly stems from a recent run-in with Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

When she responded to him, his fans and followers inundated her with awful remarks. They then created a fake Leslie Jones Twitter account to spread misinformation using lemmetweetthatforyou.com. This led to Jones taking to Twitter, where she continued to be harassed.

In an interview with Heat Street, Yiannopoulos stood by his words:

“No, of course, I don’t have any regrets. But feminists on the other hand should have regrets that they have taught strong women that they are victims and attacked people for having different opinions to them on Twitter.”

He also spoke to Breitbart to discuss Jones’ own alleged racially-charged tweets:

“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.”

“Twitter is holding me responsible for the actions of fans and trolls using the special pretzel logic of the left. Where are the Twitter police when Justin Bieber’s fans cut themselves on his behalf?”

“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.”

Missing is any reference to Twitter’s user agreement when you sign up, stating that Twitter can and will shut you down if you’re targeting abuse:

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.

Now many of Yiannopoulos supporters are banding together under #FreeMilo:

https://twitter.com/WhitestRabbit_/status/755605418026541056

https://twitter.com/JohnRiversToo/status/755601603575500802

Here were the apparent “differences of opinion” and “arguments over a movie review“:

https://twitter.com/TruDezyy/status/755255940232929284

No official word from Twitter on the suspension and if it will be a permanent ban, but it isn’t the first time that he’s battled Twitter on the public stage.