Milo Yiannopoulos, a columnist at the Trump loving conservative website Breitbart, has been permanently suspended from Twitter. This came after he set off his followers to harass Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist, sexist and just plain godawful tweets.
So how did we get here you ask?
Well, for a while now, Milo has been one of the leading public faces of GamerGate, the massive internet hate campaign about “ethics in games journalism”. The Washington Post best described it as a “freewheeling catastrophe/social movement/misdirected lynchmob.”
Secondly, ever since it was announced the film would star a female led cast, the rebooted Ghostbusters has faced significant unwarranted vitriol from the dark twisted corners of the Internet, including certain prominent figures from the GamerGate movement like Milo.
The two hate campaigns also share another thing in common alongside Milo. The victims of both of these heavily misguided crusades have been mostly women, who were then targeted and frequently harassed through personal attacks, trolling, sexism, and hate speech on social media.
Added on top of all this is Twitter. The social network has been notoriously bad at handling issues of abuse and harassment suffered by many of its female and minority user base. As Polygon pointed out:
Following GamerGate and the level of abuse directed at prominent female figures within the industry two years ago, designers and programmers came together at conferences around the country to come up with ways to help deter abuse. These ideas have been sent to Twitter’s team time and time again, but nothing has been done to follow up or implement them. Instead, Twitter has been relying on the same methods it’s been using for years, and the unfortunate fact remains that those techniques never worked and still don’t work.
So if you combine Milo and his sociopath cohorts in the He-Man Woman Haters Club, with Twitter and their lack of support for victims of harassment, what follows is a genuine recipe for disaster. That is how we got to Leslie Jones being tormented with abuse until she was forced off of Twitter. Polygon put it bluntly:
The attack on Jones didn’t just reiterate that Twitter has an abuse problem, but reconfirmed that Twitter has a response problem. Twitter doesn’t reward its users for being a part of the service, and can hardly defend them from being harassed by armies of men with nothing better to do than attack someone for being a woman, for being a person of color, or for identifying as LGBT.
Thankfully, with Milo’s ban there is hope that Twitter is starting to take online harassment seriously. The social network released a statement saying they realise they haven’t done enough to curb abusive behaviour and are working on improving themselves.
Here’s hoping.
Frank/Ash 