[UPDATE: Milo has been banned for good from Twitter. My thoughts here.]
More than a year and a half of manbaby whining wasn’t enough to derail the opening weekend of the Ghostbusters reboot: the film took in a greater-than-expected $46 million in the US, and Sony is already talking about a sequel.
And so the Lady-Ghostbuster-haters have returned to their roots. And by that I mean harassing women. The woman they’ve chosen to target this time? Leslie Jones, who, in the tiny minds of her harassers, has two strikes against her: 1) she’s one of the stars of the Ghostbusters reboot and 2) she’s black.
The harassment campaign seems to have started in earnest yesterday morning, not long after “journalist” and Internet Nazi apologist Milo Yiannopoulos posted his, er, review of Ghostbusters on Breitbart, singling out Jones as “the worst of the lot. The actress is spectacularly unappealing, even relative to the rest of the odious cast.”
After this, the deluge. Racist Twitter goons swarmed Jones, attacking her as a “coon” and a “savage,” and comparing her to Harambe the ape; one critic, Jones reported, sent her “a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means.”
Taken aback at the sheer nastiness of the attacks, Jones started posting screenshots of some of the most blatantly racist abuse.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
So sad pic.twitter.com/WQn097m9hn
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
Exposing pic.twitter.com/jfSbGj3yCP
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
I just don't understand pic.twitter.com/N9xWoXPttu
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
Did Milo and his Twitter goons organize this campaign of abuse? I don’t know. But he definitely poured fuel on the fire.
After Jones reported him on Twitter for abuse, Milo (or someone working for Breitbart Tech, which Milo ostensibly runs) assigned a Breitbart Tech “reporter” to write a “news” article about this momentous event. No, really.
When asked for official comment on his blocking by Jones this is what Milo said: “She must have read my review! Honestly, this is why I say feminism is cancer. She used to be funny but being involved in a social justice dumpster fire like Ghostbusters has reduced her to the status of just another frothing loon on Twitter.”
Further ridiculing Jones, Milo said, “Imagine it: the star of a Hollywood blockbuster sitting at home reporting random people on social media for saying her movie sucked. Sad!”
Imagine the editor of Breitbart Tech assigning a reporter to interview him about being blocked and reported on Twitter. Beyond sad.
Milo then Tweeted screenshots of some obviously fake Tweets purportedly from Jones that some of her haters had conjured up and posted on Twitter.
Sad! pic.twitter.com/IT4cb24Bik
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) July 19, 2016
Wow, Leslie! pic.twitter.com/Ni2J3rod9R
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) July 19, 2016
Don't tell me some mischievous internet rascal made them up! https://t.co/u8QRgaThTE
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) July 19, 2016
Truly a class act, all the way.
After many hours of this sort of abuse, Jones responded to the hate with a series of heartfelt tweets.
I don't know how to feel. I'm numb. Actually numb. I see the words and pics and videos. Videos y'all. Meaning people took time to sprew hate
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
As much as you want to thinks actors ain't human I want to give you something to think about. I work off pure passion for this game.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
I'm more human and real than you fucking think.I work my ass off. I'm not different than any of you who has a dream to do what they love.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
I've never claim to be better or special. I just try to do my job as best as I can. Isn't that any of us yall. So Yea this hurts me!
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
It's like when you think "ok I've proven I'm worthy" then you get hit with a shovel of hated. I'm numb. I mean I know there is racism.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
But I'm I that naive to think that some things was changing yes I was. We still live in a world where we have to say "black lives matter"
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
I'm so tired of it. Why is this still a fight? I want to hate so bad but I can't because I know it doesn't fix anything and just make me sad
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
Stop saying ignore them or that's just the way it is. Cause that's bullshit. Everybody knows an asshole check them for their hate.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
Stop letting the ignorant people be the loud ones. Y'all I got more love than hate but they louder. Fuck that be louder.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that. You can see on the
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It's not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
And for all the "don't stoop to their level people" it's way past that. So please have a seat. Don't tell me how to react.
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
Cause I have every right to be offended and pissed. So for right now I have to take a break. All this hatred giving me the blues! Outty 5000
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart.All this cause I did a movie.You can hate the movie but the shit I got today…wrong
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016
The haters gloated over their “victory.”
> IMMA EXPOSE THE TROLLS
[twelve hours later]
> I LEAVE HERE IN TEARS pic.twitter.com/aK39J4Oebm
— Lo-Ping (@GamingAndPandas) July 19, 2016
If you’re on Twitter, show your support for Jones in the #LoveForLeslieJ hashtag.
And consider sending a strong but politely worded note to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack) to let him know that Twitter’s continued inability or unwillingness to rein in its nastiest abusers and trolls is not acceptable.
Twitter can be a marvellous platform to share thoughts and jokes and links and ridiculous gifs. It can also be the enabler of vicious campaigns of harassment and abuse. Twitter provided the platform that made the racist harassment campaign against Jones possible.
Get it together, Twitter, or Leslie Jones won’t be the only one signing off.
H/T — Thanks to everyone who brought this to my attention. Thanks to Colby Klaus, whose post on the Amala Network offered a detailed timeline of the abuse and highlighted Milo’s role in all this, which I drew on in writing this post. And thanks to @TakedownMRAs for staying on top of this and pointing out Lo-ping’s gloating Tweet.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!
I’m seriously asking (and with shouty caps to boot) because this is so frustrating. How do some people get off on others’ misery? “I’m an abusive meat sack, whose only joy in life is to torture others – yay me!”
What would it take to make these people understand the gravity of what they do? Something similar happening to their loved ones? It’s not something that should ever be done, but I’m seriously wondering if they’ve lost all ability to empathize or even just understand why there are rules in society.
I know I shouldn’t dehumanize people I disagree with, but I have a hard time just humanizing people when they get boners over suicide. How does this shit happen?!
Yeah, Christians tend not to be aware that Jesus actually is a major figure in Muslim theology. He’s the second most important prophet beside Mohammed and plays a major role in their version of the end times.
Muslim Jesus is unrecognizable to Christians, though– they believe in the existence somewhere of a direct Gospel According to Jesus. Nobody has the actual text of it, but the Quran gives an executive summary and he totally renounces any claim to divinity and says he’s “just” the penultimate prophet (and talks up Mohammed to come).
they deserve the kitty pic treatment.
Wow. So much for ‘words can never hurt me’. That’s just awful.
The movie was good, and now I’m going to buy DVD copies to all my family.
@repentantphonebooth: good for you.
@rugbyyogi: going back to hiding under a rock is looks by better all the time.
@banned: I knew that Muslims regarded Jesus as a prophet, but I didn’t know they accepted the Christian Revelation of John. Interesting.
Twitter enforce your damn rules and stop catering to literal neo nazis.
This reminds me of videos saying that this is restricting dissent. When the dissent are literal nazis, bigots, anti semites/gay/trans/women and such, I really don’t see the argument having grounds.
Which is why I’m having trouble understanding why someone like Mr. Enter would be against this. Then again in the episode “Homer Bad Man” he decided to use the episode of false outrage of a women doing it, and didn’t even mention any of the women who are subject to this. Now that I think about it he seems to have quite an undercurrent of sexism. Like in his followup video to the episode where Peter gets sexually harassed. He even mentions pregnancy and forcing dad to care for kid, and how men have less rights in court custody which is false, and that’s when I just started to froth
Back to the topic at hand, the fact that Milo isn’t banned for this shit is clear on how little Twitter actually cares for moderating their platform. She has every right to, and they are explicitly restricting free speech by ensuring she doesn’t have a voice. The irony is rich. I hope that with her fame she might get some form of compensation, after all isn’t that what Twitter caters too?
“dont feed the trolls” was a workable concept in the stone age when you had like five dedicated mods warching a prehistoric forum ready to banhammer motherfuckers. It doesnt work when you have an army of trolls attacking peasants and lords alike but the King refuses to do anything to stop them. Milo alone should have been banned long has since. Real freedom of speech is now supressed by bullying tactics. Because somehow twitter sees nazis as part of their profit model I guess?
@kale
Might as well be since they seem to not even bother to hire a competent moderation team, or a team that bothers to enforce its own rules.
Right now there only seems to be mob rule, and getting scripts to mod the experience to avoid mob rule.
@ jokester
It’s not quite the Revelation model, but there is an Islamic eschatology.
Most Muslims regard it in the same way as most Christians. That is to say, there is an ‘end times’ but they’re not expecting it anytime soon.
Rather like those fringe Christian groups though who believe the apocalypse is imminent, and if possible they’d like to help it along, there are a (very) few Muslims who think that way. It’s a big part of ISIS’s philosophy. Establishing the caliphate is a necessary precursor; a bit like how some Christian sects think all the Jews need to return to Israel first. Note that ISIS’s in-house magazine is called ‘Dabiq’. Dabiq is the Islamic equivalent of Armageddon, the town where the last battle will take place (and with similar implications about the name itself)
Oh, Guardian article on this topic. So far the comment section isn’t too horrible, but suspect the GG lot will be out in force soon to point out this is just “ethics in film criticism”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/jul/19/twitter-attacks-on-ghostbusters-leslie-jones
(Warning, the writer uses ‘hearted’ as a verb!)
Right so I’m quite sure that this ‘end times’ bullshit is quite linked to the ‘let’s burn it all down’ kinda philosophy – the race war invoking, shoot ’em up kinda thing that isn’t really conducive to building a positive society. Yes, I had forgotten that D’aesh was very into this, but I didn’t ever know that Jesus plays a big role in Revelations type way.
Where is Dabiq – is it a real town we might know of today?
I have to use Daesh because Isis was my favourite Saturday morning show as a kid and there’s no way I’m gonna let those fuckers have that.
__
But back to the film thing – yes,I do not believe that most of these people would ever talk to her like that in real life. They might think it,but they wouldn’t say it. I won’t be seeing the film, because I do not go to the cinema. But best of luck to the film makers and I hope it mints it.
I’d call Milo a piece of shit, but shit has a purpose as fertilizer. He’s like that floating sea of plastic rubbish that floats around in the ocean. The thrown away useless garbage of modern society that no one will deal with until it’s too late so it just floats around destroying everything it touches.
As for ‘how can people do this’, I think it’s a combination of anonymity leading to a lack of accountability and the difficulty may people have recognizing people you’ve never met as ‘real’. Those are my thoughts, and not difinative, but I feel confident that that’s at least a large part of the issue.
@joekster: XKCD had it right; Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words can make be think I deserved it.
There’s some real toxic garbage out there these days, for sure.
Nobody deserves that kind of abuse, especially not just for being black, a woman and funny.
I went to see the first two Ghostbusters films when they came out. I’m definitely going to see this movie.
I only use twitter bc other platforms are worse imho. w twitter I can use a program a user created to mass block at least.
I’ve come to think that some of these vile beings take pride in not having what we would consider ordinary human emotions. They’ve adopted identities built around being impossible to insult or hurt, like an evil Vulcan kohlinaru, and deride their victims for feeling the pain they inflict. “Ha, ha, if you were a shitlord like me, my harassment and bullying wouldn’t bother you!”
The fact that Leslie Jones is noticeably more successful in her chosen career than Milo the Bad has been in his makes this even uglier, somehow.
@rugbyyogi I loved that show, too! 🙂 I prefer to use Daesh mostly because of the goddess Isis (Auset), and also apparently Daesh hates it. 😉
I don’t know how much of this is merely because Leslie Jones is a stranger to them. People cyberbully people they know all the time. They also use more traditional bullying tactics out in meatspace. I think technology has just given people who were already abusive another platform and allowed them to expand their targets.
I’m almost in tears myself over this. I’m not a fan of hers because our humor simply doesn’t mesh, but I’ve never hated her, or wished anything bad on her simply because i don’t like her humor.
No one deserves this for making a harmless movie.
For those of you who have never heard of “Misogynoir”. this is a perfect example of it. She’s catching hell not just for being a woman, but specifically because she’s a Black woman.
Anybody who comes at me about how white women get treated just as bad can sit down and have a bunch of seats. Its not about the level of treatment, or how bad it is. Its about the intersection of race and gender.
Semi-lurker delurking:
I really, really hate the “don’t feed the trolls” mentality when it comes to abusive bullies. Also, the “all speech should be allowed”/big tent bullshit. No one needs to respect, defend, or protect the bigots.
In that Guardian article, they used the word choice of sanitized. I’m sorry, but I can still use the word fuck without adding any bigoted language. I assume that bigots can too, but that’s not a choice they are making. They’re like black mold; it can cause you a myriad of problems and if it’s bad enough, it’ll kill you if you can’t get rid of it.
I just wish more internet spaces took their TOS seriously and would boot out the bigots. I refuse to go on Reddit or Twitter because of shit like this.
I almost cried reading this. How can anyone do this to someone? These people have no values, no empathy, no humanity. They are just disgusting.
What really gets to me is that the fonts aren’t even correct on the fake tweets.
I know that sounds silly, but hear me out: They’re not even fucking trying. These tweets are blatantly fake, but people are swallowing it, and her harassers are using them to mock her.
They don’t have to put any effort into their harassment. They just have to direct the bile hose at her.
Utterly, utterly vile. And Milo has sunk to new lows, even by his wretched standards. Also, the massive hypocrisy of MRAs squealing about ‘free speech’ while simultaneously getting their knickers in a tizzy over somebody exercising their free speech to do an all-female remake.
@Paradoxical Intention
I noticed that too. I thought maybe it was something that people who use twitter can do, but now I guess not?
I guess people who use twitter and believe this actually want to believe it.
There is a vile archived thread on 4chan /pol/ with people gloating over what they did. you can find it with those terms plus leslie jones in google, because I am not linking it here. So many trigger warnings I couldn’t list them all so I am just saying view at your own risk. I want to find where this originated but I can’t.