Milo Yiannopoulos Website Abruptly Shuts Down After Sale

com, a promotional website launched by Milo Yiannopoulos a few years ago, abruptly went offline over the weekend, a further indication of the reported financial woes of conservative provocateur.

A notice on the site says the site has been sold and is no longer "associated with its former owner." When reached by email for comment, the 34-year-old "declined to respond" to any questions. Yiannopoulos was Editor-At-Large at Dangerous.com, which featured work from other writers along with merchandise and funding appeals to his supporters.

Yiannopoulos has repeatedly complained about being "de-platformed," getting banned from the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — for violating rules against harassment and hate speech. He has found a home on the Telegram App, which, as Vice News noted recently, has become the favorite social media platform of extremists.

Yiannopoulos has more than 19,000 followers on Telegram, a fraction of the 700,000 or so followers that he had on Twitter and Instagram. He has fumed about his dwindling audience for months and has claimed to be millions of dollars in debt. According to The Daily Dot, Yiannopoulos recently described Telegraph as a "wasteland."

"It's just not a good use of my time to be here," the site quotes Yiannopoulos as saying. "Talking to the same 1,000 people, none of whom buy books, tickets to anything or donate."

Yiannopoulos gained notoriety as a self-described social media troll, taking delight in offending liberals and butting heads with some of his fellow conservatives.

Dangerous.com was launched in 2017 when many in the mainstream media had written Yiannopoulos off after comments surfaced that seemed to condone pedophilia. Simon & Schuster yanked Dangerous, a memoir/free speech manifesto, off the shelves just as it shot up the best-seller lists. The American Conservative Union canceled his invitation to address its high-profile CPAC conference. He resigned from Breitbart, the site where he first gained notoriety for claiming that "Feminism is a cancer," among other things.

A gifted self-promoter, Yiannopoulos is a master of turning lemons into lemonade. He embraced the controversy that surrounded him and tried to turn it into a brand. At the time of the launch of Dangerous.com, he said "secret investors" had given him $12 million to start his business. Yiannopoulos even came up with a manifesto of sorts in all caps which I have reprinted below:

DANGEROUS IS OWNED AND OPERATED BY MILO INC., A 360-DEGREE MEDIA COMPANY CONCEIVED OF AND FOUNDED BY MILO. MILO, INC. IS DEDICATED TO LEADING THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION BY HARNESSING MILO'S UNIQUE BLEND OF LAUGHTER AND WAR.

Like other conservatives, Yiannopoulos has accused social media platforms of targeting him for his political views. For now, the chances of Yiannopoulos returning to social media are remote though I wouldn’t discount it entirely in the current political environment.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, platforms like Facebook have broad discretion in determining what content appears on their sites and who gets to use them.

 Courts have repeatedly rejected challenges brought by people kicked off Facebook and Twitter. Conservatives are eager to weaken Section 230, and tech companies are taking note.  

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg met with Conservative journalists and at least one Republican lawmaker to discuss free speech and other issues, according to Politico.