Why did Twitter take so long to finally ban one of its biggest trolls?

Twitter on Tuesday night permanently banned conservative pundit and Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos from its platform. 

Yiannopoulos was banned for his role in the online harassment of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. After writing a scathing review of the film, Yiannopoulos and Jones exchanged words on Twitter. 

Jones was sent a deluge of harassing messages, many of them racist. Jones left Twitter on Monday night. I don’t blame her. As she said herself, all of this over a movie. 

It’s important to note that Yiannopoulos himself didn’t send the most hateful messages. What he did do was post screencaps of fake tweets that made it seem like Jones herself was saying hateful, terrible things. This only fed the trolls that continued to harass and attack her. 

And that action – making those fake tweets and helping incite a mob against Jones – was finally enough for Twitter to kick Yiannopoulos off of its platform. 

My question is, why did it take this long? 

Yiannopoulos has been trolling users and courting controversy for years. 

In his articles on Breitbart, his podcast, his speeches on college campuses and on Twitter, he has become one of the most visible public figures on the alt-right. He lives to tweet things that are often beyond the pale. 

And the Jones incident isn’t the first time he has helped incite a mob against others. In January, that behavior led Yiannopoulos to lose his verified status. 

He was briefly suspended last month over remarks he made about Islam in the wake of the nightclub shooting in Orlando. So, again, why did it take so long for Twitter to take action? 

This isn't about free speech

Twitter’s decision to ban Yiannopoulos from the site has led his followers to blast the site for not respecting free speech. 

But let’s be very clear, this is not about free speech. Twitter may be a public square – where almost anything can go – but it isn’t a public space. 

Instead, as my colleague Alex Hazlett pointed out, the site is more like Zuccotti Park – site of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City in 2011. Protesters were allowed to encamp in the park for nearly two months until they were finally forced out. 

The owners of the park – Brookfield Properties – allowed takeover of the space for quite some time. But after two months of disruptions, the owners moved to vacate the protesters. The New York Supreme Court ruled that even though protesters were still welcome to protest in the park, their tents and and generators – which would allow them to live in the park – would not be allowed.

Twitter has had a similar trajectory when it comes to its policies. For years, the company erred on the side of open speech. You were much more likely to be kicked off Twitter for spam than from harassing people.

In 2011, Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo described the service as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” The context of that remark was actually to champion how Twitter had been used to organize movements in Egypt, Tunisia and Occupy Wall Street. 

What Costolo didn’t count on was that Twitter would also increasingly be used as a way to target and harass regular users. In 2015, an internal memo from Costolo admitted that the company “sucked” at dealing with abuse.  

He went as far as to say that that abuse cost Twitter more users. Costolo – and his successor Jack Dorsey – have both promised to build in better tools for dealing with harassment. 

In December, Twitter updated its official rules, with language that finally said it would “not tolerate behavior intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user’s voice.” 

Of course, a lot of that is easier said than done. 

Twitter cares about harassment when it affects its bottom line 

Milo Yiannopoulos was harassing and trolling plenty of users on Twitter before he was finally banned. 

From the outside looking in, it sure looks like Twitter only decided to step in after a famous person was the target. 

This isn’t to say Twitter wasn’t right to ban Milo – I believe it was – but I can’t help but feel that the response reads as disingenuous. 

It took a person in power, using her platform to highlight the attacks against her, for Twitter to finally crack down on a known agitator. 

Similarly, it took the Chuck Johnson raising money to “take out” civil rights activist DeRay McKesson to permanently ban him from the service. Johnson had been suspended from Twitter and once revealed the unconfirmed identity of an alleged rape victim. 

Like Yiannopoulos, Johnson’s ban was absolutely deserved – but it’s worth noting that it only came after a prominent figure became the target. 

And that’s the problem. 

For all of Twitter’s talk about how it is going to crack down on harassment, its tools and policies really only benefit the verified and the famous. 

I get it. Scaling harassment is hard. But plenty of users have offered suggestions on how to fix the problem. Others have gone further, deftly discussing how "free speech" could be moderated. 

Twitter has made improvements to its abuse reporting process. It has also improved its response time to reports. But so much continues to go unchecked. 

A woman I’m friends with was harassed and her location was tweeted by a stranger, with invitations for others to find and follow her. It took several of us reporting these tweets – multiple times – for any action to be taken. This was just a few weeks ago. 

What is Twitter going to do about those users? 

The concept of simply verifying everyone so that they can take advantage of Twitter’s “quality” filters doesn’t scale. 

Twitter abuse has made headlines in the past. When Robin Williams’ daughter left the service in 2014, it was a news event. But then it was framed as the unfortunate actions of a bunch of trolls from 8Chan. 

Over the years, the harassment problem on Twitter is beginning to look systemic. 

And Twitter isn’t doing enough to solve the problem. It’s great that Jack Dorsey can step-in when high profile users are bullied on the platform. Those users should be protected. Leslie Jones doesn’t deserve any of the harassment coming her way. 

But the company still feels woefully unprepared for actually dealing with the broader harassment problem. 

For celebrities and public figures, Twitter can promote its Engage app as a way to treat the service as more of a broadcast from vessel – rather than the back and forth
nature that arguably made the platform great. 

It’s all well and good that Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos from its platform. But it shouldn’t take the harassment of a celebrity for it to ban the users that follow in his foot steps.