Last night was interesting, to say the least.
Around 5:00 PM Central Standard Time, I’d gathered online with the Superversive SF gang, including Hugo nominees Jason Rennie and John C. Wright for a Google Livestream about SJWs in science fiction publishing. Our special guest of honor was meant to be Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
Milo was running fashionably late, so I was keeping an eye on his Twitter account for updates, when this happened:
Long story short, Twitter had picked the moment before Milo’s scheduled appearance on our show to deverify his account. Twitter verification is a little blue check mark added to a celebrity user’s account as a sign of assurance that he is who he says he is. As far as anybody can tell, no one else’s account has ever been deverified before.
Milo has speculated that the unorthodox move is a preliminary step toward suspending his Twitter account as punishment for his conservative politics. If the social network’s sordid history of politically motivated action against the likes of Adam Baldwin and several members of #GamerGate are any indication, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Dealing with Twitter’s thought policing forced Milo to bow out. Yet the show, as they say, must go on. (Luckily, we were able to get Daddy Warpig!) As you might expect, his deverification made for an excellent topic of conversation on a roundtable about SJWs.
As for Milo, his legions of disciples served Twitter swift poetic justice of Shakespearean magnitude. For you see, since verified accounts exist to prevent users from impersonating celebrities, deverification means that all bets are off.
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| The Milos are multiplying. |
The #JeSuisMilo hashtag immediately sprang into being. Within hours, it became the #1 trending tag in the US and reached #3 worldwide. Milo Yiannopoulos tribute accounts are now multiplying like flies, to the extent that some predict that the whole internet will soon become Milo.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s stock and popularity continue to plummet. With calls for users to abandon the site in favor of less totalitarian platforms, Twitter may become the victim of the monster it created last night.
Twitter clearly takes issue with Milo’s personal convictions. Instead of prosecuting an online inquisition leading to a global, perhaps fatal, backlash that’s already being called “a second GamerGate”, Twitter could have just let Milo share his views on a podcast that usually gets a few hundred viewers.
But maniacal overreach has always been the Achilles’ heel of totalitarian ideologues.
