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Leslie Jones has been the target of recent online abuse, following the release of Ghostbusters. Jones exposed users who were sending her hateful and racist tweets, asking other users to report the harassers to Twitter. Twitter has responded to the reports of the online abuse, and they have suspended one user who lead the attack on Jones.
Milo Yiannopoulos, who went by @nero and had nearly 400,000 followers on Twitter, is an online conservative blogger who lead the online abuse towards Jones. Yiannopoulos tweeted that Jones’ was “barely literate,” and said she was “playing the victim.”
Twitter took action of suspending Yinnopoulos’ account and made the following statement:
“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. 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. Over the past 48 hours in particular, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.”
Although there were many hateful tweets aimed at Jones, Twitter users were quick to come to her defense. Director of Ghostbusters, Paul Feig, posted a tweet with the #LoveForLeslieJ. The hashtag became a trending topic on Twitter, filled with positive comments about Jones.
Jones has since taken a break from the social media platform. Read more on the story here.
