Editorial: Boot the trolls before they ruin the party

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If you show up at a party and throw around a lot of racist and sexist invective, chances are the host will throw you out.

If not, all the decent people will leave and, soon enough, only the haters will remain.

So it goes for Milo Yiannopoulos, who was kicked off Twitter on Tuesday. Yiannopoulos, who had been warned before, finally wore out his welcome by, in Twitter’s apparent view, egging on an online campaign of abuse against the comedian Leslie Jones, a co-star of the new “Ghostbusters” movie.

Yiannopoulos, a technology editor at the conservative news site Breitbart, called Twitter’s ban an attack on free speech, which is what trolls always say when they get the boot. But Twitter is a private business, not a branch of government, free to set its own rules of conduct. It was protecting its brand.

Here’s hoping, in fact, that this is only the first step in a long overdue serious effort by Twitter to run off the racists, misogynists and all-around haters who threaten to ruin the party for the rest of us.

Twitter has been criticized for years for doing too little to police civility and decency among its users. This has led the giant social media company in the last year to begin banning certain images (such as beheadings by ISIS and revenge porn) and to write new anti-harassment rules. But Twitter continues to turn a blind eye to much of the most egregious conduct.

In June, in a column that ironically went viral on Twitter, a New York Times editor, Jonathan Weisman, announced he was quitting Twitter because, despite his protests, the company failed to enforce its code of conduct against an army of trolls barraging him with anti-Semitic comments. “It is not a close call,” Weisman wrote, “when a user named ‘Holololocaust’ tweets out beautiful women in Nazi uniforms.”

But it is the abuse rained down on Leslie Jones, who is African-American, that seems to have woken up the folks in Twitter’s executive offices. For weeks, anonymous Twitter commentators hurled racist remarks at Jones, none of which we care to repeat here. She complained, singling out Yiannopoulos as an instigator.

Finally, on Monday, Jones posted her final tweet: “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie.”

The next day, Twitter banned Yiannopoulos, without specifically noting a tie to the abuse of Jones. The company also issued a statement that read in part: “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.”

Twitter may have gotten religion. In its statement, the company said it actually agrees with critics who say it has not “done enough” to curb the trolls. It said it is “continuing to invest” in ways to “take faster action on abuse as it’s happening and prevent repeat offenders.”

Any media company worth its salt welcomes a robust public debate on even the most sensitive issues, but that doesn’t preclude a prohibition on misogyny and hate. On the contrary, the quickest way to kill a good debate is to let the trolls take over.

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