The trouble with Milo -- and Twitter
In the latest social media drama, Breitbart tech editor and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been, apparently, perma-banned from Twitter for allegedly inciting the racist harassment of Ghostbusters co-star Leslie Jones. Milo has long accused Twitter of political bias, and now his supporters are accusing Twitter management of censoring and suppressing conservative views. A #freemilo hashtag has been trending. On the other hand, some staunchly pro-free-speech commentators such as Reason's Robby Soave are not quite in Milo's corner.
There are two different questions here. One, does Milo deserve sympathy and support? And two, is Twitter's enforcement of anti-harassment rules politically biased, rife with favoritism, and generally inconsistent?
First things first. As many people know, Milo and I were once allies in our support of #gamergate and, more broadly, of the "cultural libertarian" movement. We were on the same GamerGate panel at the August 2015 conference of the Society of Professional Journalists. We had friendly exchanges on Twitter. I appeared on Milo's web show, including on a fundraiser for the defense of Gregory Allan Eliot, the Canadian man prosecuted on frivolous charges of Twitter harassment. I also wrote in Milo's defense last January when Twitter took away his verification.
As quite a few people also know, I have long had misgivings about many of Milo's antics. (I was fairly overt about it in my piece about his de-verification.) I didn't like the way his online conflicts tended to escalate into nasty personal attacks. While I thought, and still think, that many of Milo's affronts to "political correctness" were funny and well-deserved, such as invading Slutwalk with a "Harry Potter and rape culture - both fantasy" placard, I also increasingly felt that his stance as an anti-"Social Justice Warrior" provocateur was a way to get away with saying genuinely nasty stuff about women, minorities, and other groups in a "just-kidding-or-maybe-not" way. I still think, for instance, that this is hilarious:
This, on the other hand, is unfunny and nasty, and while I certainly don't think such an opinion deserves Twitter sanctions, it also doesn't exactly give cultural libertarianism a good name.
In the fall of 2015, Milo began defending the far-right backlash against "cuckservatives" -- a label for mainstream conservatives who were accused of being insufficiently patriotic and, often overtly, of being insufficiently pro-white. (The label, derived from the word "cuckold," apparently refers to "cuck porn" in which men watch their wives having sex with black studs.) For a while, I thought he was just being an enfant terrible. Then, in late March of this year, Milo and his sidekick Allum Bokhari wrote a lengthy Breitbart article in defense of the "alternative right," the loosely structured movement that has diverse elements but is dominated by various shades of white identity politics, racialism, and outright white supremacism (complete with virulent anti-Semitism). I responded with a critique on The Federalist and then here at Allthink.com. Milo later attacked me on Breitbart for a piece on Ann Coulter's anti-Semitic signaling.
As far as I'm concerned, Milo's recent career is a striking example of the pitfalls of being anti-PC for the sake of being anti-PC. He now hangs out with and defends people who taunt Jews with Holocaust jokes and deride blacks as chimps and gorillas. In May, his new pals bombarded his former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro with vile tweets after the birth of his son, calling the child a "newborn cockroach" and wishing gas chambers on Shapiro's entire family. Here's Milo's contribution, a charming riff on the idea that conservatives who oppose racism are "cucked" by blacks:
More recently, Milo used the "Jew parentheses"--the symbol Internet neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites use to target Jews--as a taunt against liberal (Jewish) financier George Soros on Twitter and made a comment about anti-Trump conservatives collecting "shekels from their globalist paymasters" in a chat on the Trump Reddit board. Tongue-in-cheek? Sure, except that Milo is pandering to and stoking some very real ugliness which he waves off as fun and games by rebellious kids.
Milo is a very smart, talented, charismatic man. I still believe he was on the right side when he joined the fight against the crypto-totalitarian "social justice" cult. But I've always thought that, unfortunately, any backlash against "progressive" cultural politics was likely to be a magnet for actual racism, misogyny, and other bigotries. Today, Milo is actively boosting these malignant forces. As his "Daddy" Donald Trump would say: Sad!
Apologies for the long introduction, but I believe it's related to where we are today.
It's possible to be an awful person with reprehensible views and still get unfairly banned from Twitter. For instance, as far as I can tell, Robert Stacy McCain, a stridently anti-gay apologist for the Confederacy, was permanently banished from the platform even though he did nothing that would remotely quality as cyber-harassment. (I wrote about it earlier this year.) Sure, Twitter has a legal right to ban politically incorrect speech, but then it should stop pretending to be a forum for diverse opinions.
Milo's case is far more complicated.
I don't think there's any evidence that he incited the harassment of Leslie Jones. But he was a very high-profile Twitter user who stepped in to taunt and mock her when she was being deluged with racist tweets calling her a gorilla and an ape, porn images, and so on. (One pro-Milo meme actually suggests that he was "helping Jones with Twitter trolls" when he pointed out that everyone gets hate mail. Sure, and the people who sent her photos of apes were just promoting the teaching of evolution.) That, in my view, is reprehensible. But I don't see how it violates Twitter rules.
However, it's very likely that Milo did cross the line when he tweeted screenshots of two fake tweets by her, one attacking white people and the other referring to "tha goddamn kikes at Sony." This was both impersonation, a severe violation of Twitter rules, and a pretty clear move to pour more fuel on the fire. By the time it was archived, this tweet had been retweeted nearly 600 times.
Milo's response to someone who pointed out the tweets were fake leaves no doubt that he either knew they were fake or made them himself:
Breitbart has attempted to excuse this by claiming there was no attempt to pass the screenshots off as real tweets from Jones, since their fakeness was "made clear with the lack of a verification check mark." Yet some people who responded to Milo thought the tweets were real. So did someone who tweeted at me after Milo's ban.
Breitbart also suggests that Jones incited her own harassment by "punching down" at her detractors -- and that she tried to instigate the harassment of other users by retweeting abusive tweets with comments like "I hope y'all go after them like they going after me" and "Get her!" I will say that, in my view, Jones made a mistake engaging trolls directly. But I also see no evidence that she was trying to provoke a fight, and I confess I can't bring myself to get indignant at her suggestion that her followers "go after" the morons sending her gorilla pictures. There is hardly anyone among us who has not, at some point, retweeted hostile tweets to hold their authors up for ridicule. I've done it. Milo has done it. We don't explicitly say "go get them." But we're Internet-savvy, and Jones, clearly, is not.
While I take a very dim view of the entire Ghostbusters brouhaha, I feel bad for Jones, who seemed genuinely distraught by the abuse she received and especially by other fake tweets that had her making homophobic comments about Milo. (And no, I don't think her not very funny sassy-black-lady humor on Twitter amounts to a "racist Twitter history" as Breitbart suggests. There certainly doesn't seem to be a single example of her attacking any specific person for being white.)
On the other hand, as even Verge has pointed out, Twitter has never stated any specific charges against Milo. The vague accusations of non-specific "incitement" are troubling because it seems like Milo is being blamed for his followers' actions.
Is anyone with a lot of followers on Twitter vulnerable to charges of inciting harassment if he or she ridicules or criticizes another Twitter user? The potential for abuse is certainly there, especially given how subjectively "harassment" can be defined. (Yes, what happened to Jones was clearly harassment, but I have also seen the term used to describe aggressive arguments and criticism.)
That said: Milo's fans do have a reputation for going after people. It's something I've dealt with myself. Several people have told me they don't want to publicly challenge or criticize Milo because they know they'll get mobbed by his minions. These were not "SJWs" or feminists; mostly, they were GamerGaters or ex-GamerGaters (mostly male, for what it's worth). Is Milo responsible for his fans' behavior? No, but I don't see him discouraging it.
As you can see, I'm ambivalent about Milo's perma-ban. But here's something I'm not ambivalent about at all.
Even if Milo fully deserved to get banned, there is little doubt that Twitter's management has double standards favoring "marginalized people" and the Social Justice left.
For instance: while I hold Breitbart in pretty low regard, this account of a black Breitbart reporter being repeatedly attacked as a "coon" on Twitter at the instigation of rapper Talib Kweli (who has over a million Twitter followers, more than three times Milo's follower count at the time of his ban) certainly seems to meet Twitter's criteria for "targeted abuse." Will Twitter take action? I'm not holding my breath. Likewise, Breitbart seems to have a pretty good case with regard to Twitter ignoring calls for deadly violence against cops from Black Twitter, even though Twitter rules clearly prohibit promoting violence.
Or take another example. A number of people have said that Twitter's intervention to help Leslie Jones makes good practical sense, since many Twitter users are interested in interacting with celebrities and having celebrities driven off Twitter by hate is bad for business. Fine. But where was the concern when filmmaker Joss Whedon quit Twitter after a deluge of hate over alleged misogyny in Avengers: Age of Ultron, or when British comedian Stephen Fry deleted his account after being bashed for jokes some saw as offensive to women and transgender people? (Trans activists on Twitter are notorious for ripping people to shreds for the pettiest transgressions; a few months before his departure from Twitter, Whedon was savaged for a "transphobic" joke which suggested that requirements for a female character include not having male genitalia.)
Nor one did anyone lament the "silencing" when technology entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa announced his decision to step away from advocacy for women in tech because of social media attacks from feminists who accused him of using women for self-promotion. In fact, one of the people who led the charge against Wadhwa, programmer and women-in-tech advocate Randi Harper, is an "anti-harassment advocate" who has the ear of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Harper, who has a habit of telling people to "set themselves on fire" if they cross her, has been accused of being a social media bully herself; two mainstream liberal journalists have told me that they agree with this characterization but would not go on the record to criticize Harper.
Harper's cozy relationship with Twitter management points to another problem. Twitter's (and, generally, the social media's) anti-harassment initiatives have a close relationship with "social justice" activists who act as partners and consultants on these efforts. The problem is not just that this compromises the appearance of neutrality. It's that, as I pointed out in the New York Observer earlier this year, these activists are anti-neutrality in principle: they not only tend to equate "safety" with protection from "oppressive" speech but openly support double standards that favor the "marginalized" over the "privileged." In October 2015, Wired published a roundtable discussion on combating online abuse, featuring Twitter vice president Del Harvey as well as several activists. One of the thing that stood out in that discussion was the explicit assumption that solutions to online harassment should give priority to "marginalized" victims - "women, people of color, and LGBT people" - and help advocates for progressive causes.
When this is Twitter policy, of course Twitter's suspensions and bans will not be seen as impartial.
While the perils of "mean words" are sometimes exaggerated, harassment and abuse on the Internet are a real problem. Should social media platforms do something about it? Yes, I think so. But anti-abuse policies need transparency as well as a commitment to fairness and free speech. Otherwise, efforts to curb abuse will become just another battlefield in the online wars. In fact, they already have.
UPDATE:
Many people have continued to suggest that Leslie Jones's "Get her!" tweet violated Twitter rules against "targeted abuse."
These are the tweets to which Jones was responding, from a 17-year-old Trump supporter named Kaitlyn (who was subsequently banned).
Source: here, on an alt-right blog whose owner thinks Kaitlyn has a "quirky sense of humor." For what it's worth, this same blogger thinks that Jones's "Get her!" may have been a request for people to report Kaitlyn, not to harass her. In any case, while I don't think Jones's response was very wise, I also don't think that "siccing" your followers on someone who repeatedly sends you vile abusive tweets is what Twitter defines or should define as "targeted harassment."
Interestingly, moments before she was banned, Kaitlyn tweeted to Milo (who had previously chatted with her on Twitter at least once) bragging about Jones's response to her:
That doesn't make Milo responsible for Kaitlyn's tweets, of course. But it does show that part of his schtick is giving encouragement to "rebellious" young people who think calling a black person a gorilla is scintillating anti-PC humor.