Then late Tuesday night, BuzzFeed News reported that Twitter had permanently suspended the account of conservative provocateur and Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who it said led the harassment campaign against Jones.
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She followed the offensive comments with her own tweets, including, “I feel like I’m in a personal hell”.
Jones took the time to retweet some of the posts, which included language such as “big lipped coon”, “ape” and “the source of AIDS”.
Yiannopoulos, who is now at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, has been temporarily suspended from the platform multiple times in the past but never told that his account would not be restored. “Any personal attacks against her are attacks against us all”, and encouraged people to tweet their support for Jones under the hashtag #LoveForLeslieJ.
Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones has quit Twitter after she became the target of racist trolls on social media.
“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter”, the statement reads.
In a series of posts on Monday night, Jones said she had been pummelled with racist tweets. 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. Yiannopoulos had more than 338,000 followers on Twitter prior to his suspension.
“Exposing I hope y’all go after them like they going after me”, she tweeted Monday afternoon, following it by re-posting a number of the misogynistic posts directed at her. “We agree”, Twitter’s statement said, adding that it was working to improve technology to more quickly identify and remove abusive users of the service.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also tweeted, asking Jones to direct message him when Leslie pointed out Twitter’s guidelines on free speech.
“This type of abusive behaviour is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on numerous accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others”, the statement read.
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“Twitter is holding me responsible for the actions of fans and trolls using the special pretzel logic of the left”, he wrote. But what Jones is experiencing is just one example of what is a well-documented problem for a number of Twitter’s users, especially women and members of minority groups.
