Leslie Jones is just the latest casualty of Twitter abuse

But the vicious hate aimed at Jones seems to have spawned from a review written by Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative blogger who writes for Breitbart.com and goes by the Twitter handle @nero. So if Twitter wants to ban users for relatively tame criticism, it’s going to become a lonely site fast.

But as the internet has grown uglier so has the meaning of troll.

That is a long and complicated answer for a person well-known for acting as a free speech provocateur, exploiting the nexus of politics, technology and social justice issues.

And they’ve got away with it for far too long. It was their inevitability.

GamerGate, an online movement mostly dedicated to harassing, doxing and SWATing feminists, women and minorities involved in gaming or tech, had been steadily declining in activity after one prominent target, video essayist Anita Sarkeesian, appeared on The Colbert Report. She’s in the news! He’s not on Twitter because of pro-black or pro-Islam media bias or any other conservative persecution fantasy that he and his followers are spinning.

Can Twitter trolls be tamed? But reading Jesse Singal’s typically smart analysis of how Twitter responds to harassment based on users’ relative celebrity, rather than developing clear, transparent principles that it’s capable of applying to all users, made me wonder if the only version of Twitter that many of us actually want is a purely fantastical one – or at least one that’s impossible to achieve given the present, fallen state of humanity. “You can hate the movie but the (expletive) I got today … wrong”. “Twitter and others are private corporations that have no obligation to allow these kinds of speech”, Potok told AFP. In a statement to Buzzfeed, it says it has taken enforcement actions against accounts they found to be violating these policies. Come back Leslie, we love you! You’re right, there’s a but coming.

To look at any public figure’s Twitter feed is to stare into the abyss. Nor do I wish to trot out the line promulgated by some that anything vaguely upsetting or offensive to a religion or ideology is in some sense an ‘abuse ” of free speech.

Tick, tick, tick, tick boom! It’s a tricky balancing act, one that Twitter admits it hasn’t gotten right yet. But introducing verified accounts was a step in the right direction, because it ties Twitter IDs to real life.

Yiannopoulos wrote a scathing review of Ghostbusters on Monday titled “Teenage boys with tits”, calling it “a movie to help lonely middle-aged women feel better about being left on the shelf”. Its prohibition on “hateful conduct” reads: “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease”. But it’s a nightmare with a very simple solution, and that’s to offer filters. Fine, I initially thought; that’s what the block button is for. That’s too primitive, and it’s ineffective against tactics such as dogpiling.

Can it see when hundreds or even thousands start tweeting to one account at once in a sort of coordinated attack similar to what happened to Jones? In these examples and countless others, Twitter was unable to control its abusive users. He uses his Breitbart column for manifestos, his Twitter account to rally the troops, and speaking tours to rewards them for their loyalty. It would just make sure that nobody is forced to listen to their bullsh*t.