Milo Yiannopoulos, (Yiannopoulos was born in Greece to a Greek father and Jewish mother)
the Breitbart tech editor and Trump-loving alt-right superstar, has been permanently banned from Twitter following accusations that he directed his followers to send abusive comments toward actress Leslie Jones.
But while Yiannopoulos certainly straddles the line between being a free speech provocateur and merely a serial violator of Twitter’s terms of service, these sanctions are likely to increase the perception that Twitter is no place for conservative voices.
Yiannopoulos’s brawl with Jones stems from her role in the new Ghostbusters movie, which features an all-female cast. The movie has taken on a culture war context: opponents of the film think its characters were made female in order to appease the dictates of political correctness. Yiannopoulos gave the movie a negative review, and soon thereafter got into a public Twitter fight with Jones.
It’s not clear whether Yiannopoulos actually told his followers to direct abusive tweets at Jones—he emphatically denies doing so. But Jones began receiving truly despicable tweets and images from Yiannopoulos’s crowd, which prompted her to quit Twitter and even captured the attention of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who reached out to Jones and asked her to follow him so that they could communicate privately.
The end result was this: Yiannopoulos is permanently banned from Twitter.