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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I can assist: Shaun King calls Jason Whitlock a "coon". He keeps his verified check and account. If that isn't personal, racial abuse and harassment, I'm not sure what is.

EDIT: Not being tremendously familiar with this spat, it took me a while to figure out what Milo got banned for. Best I can figure out, it was for calling a Ghostbusters actress "barely literate". Since that's a bit of a weak-tea insult, I imagine the real offense was not stopping (how?) his army of followers from tweeting other vile things at the woman. Is that our standard? Should we hold peaceful BLM leaders responsible for tweets from their followers promoting cop-killing?

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What happened with Milo is less about him attacking Leslie Jones, and more about his _followers_ attacking Leslie Jones. Milo knows full well that if he identifies someone for his heckling, he'll have thousands of trolls and their sockpuppets do the heavy lifting for him.

And Leslie has told her followers to attack people before too

(looking for the tweet)

Hopefully Twitter told her that isn't acceptable. I'm pretty Milo has been asked to cool it before.

Milo was temporary banned, at least three times, and had his verification revoked. You can't say he wasn't warned.

I personally don't think people should be accountable for their followers behavior, but let's suppose it is so.

Then, should we ban people such as Shanley, Randi Harper and their likes when they "unleash" their followers on some guy?

And this is actually different. While Milo did not explicitly call for the attacks, Shanley and Randi routinely do call for a target to be abused, for their companies to be harassed until the target is terminated, etc.

I don't support any side, I'm just trying to show that the first comment regarding consistency is indeed accurate, Twitter has none.

>I don't support any side, I'm just trying to show that the first comment regarding consistency is indeed accurate, Twitter has none.

No argument here. Twitter's inconsistent, if not outright apathetic about abuse no matter where it comes from. It's been pointed out there's no shortage of harassment and abuse from people on the left on Twitter. Maybe not at the rate and volume of the "alt-right" types, but it doesn't matter. Twitter needs to clean house.

The thing is they're not really apathetic. They seem to pick a target once in a while and go overboard with the retaliation. And it seems to be just out of the blue for no specific reason other than the mood of the day.

>Then, should we ban people such as Shanley, Randi Harper and their likes when they "unleash" their followers on some guy?

Absolutely. If the goal for Twitter is to be a place free from this sort of abuse, then anyone using a position of prominence to call for harassment and abuse should not be allowed to do so.

I don't actually know who these people are/that they've done what you're saying, but if it's true, then I don't think it's a hard question at all.

That's absolutely tame compared to the level of abusive content from right leaning accounts on the site. A mean spirited name calling like the example cherry picked has nothing on the hordes of alt-right leaning death threats and personalized abuse laid against progressive figures on the site.

Should we hold peaceful BLM leaders responsible for tweets from their followers promoting cop-killing?

Actually, I do think we should hold "peaceful" BLM leaders morally (not legally) responsible for tweets from their followers. How can a movement of justice accept the silence or ineffectiveness of BLM leaders with regards to inculcating a non-vile culture and calling out hate speech? Isn't tolerating that sort of thing from a movement's followers for the sake of internal politics and membership basically the same thing as tolerating a number of bad cops for the sake of "thin blue line" solidarity and internal police politics? It's not viable without becoming hypocritical. The only difference is in direct connection and legal consequence, not in the overall morality.

I think we can tolerate vileness as a culture and society, but we should not welcome it -- especially if it starts to abrogate what participants would consent to. We can't tolerate hate speech that incites to violence, period. We should not laud internet vileness as some kind of magical problem-solving "pure" expression, which is what we seem to be doing now. There is an important difference between a freedom and a virtue. Movements of social justice need to be teaching virtue. Otherwise, history shows us that such things will tend to devolve into demagoguery and mob behavior.

I think Milo was banned because he was retweeting fake epithet laced hate speech tweets that were made to look like they came from Leslie Jones:

http://fusion.net/story/327103/leslie-jones-twitter-racism/

Except Milo has been suspended before. Multiple times. Confusion towards his suspension has only considered this single incident in a vacuum.

Yeah, a criminal law analogy of Milo's circumstance would be being sent to prison for a probation violation.

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