Talk about your major backfire. Twitter sought to “punish” Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos and ended up with a Hydra situation on their hands. The “punishment” of the gay conservative—who often revels in driving social justice warriors, especially feminists, up a wall with his machine-gun-style spewing of facts and resented, undeniable charm—resulted in 20,000-plus new Twitter followers.
The Gamer-Gate figure-head was first targeted in December when he jokingly announced to the world via Twitter that he was now Buzzfeed’s new “Social Justice Editor.” Twitter suspended his account for only a matter of minutes before the onslaught of his dedicated fans rallied around their leader with their “Free Nero” (Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle is Nero) demands.
In the most recent attempt to presumably teach Yiannopoulos a lesson, Twitter removed the conservative’s blue “verified” checkmark. Soon, all hell broke loose and the #JeSuisMilo hashtags flooded Twitter and trended globally.
Feminists over at the Huffington Post, a known left-wing echo-chamber, began to cheer the removal of the now-infamous blue checkmark; the publication even ran a column called “Thank You Twitter – By Unverifying Milo Yiannopoulos, You Are Standing Up For Women Online.”
(Note: Yes, feminists seem to be in a perpetual state of anger no matter what the circumstance, but their concentrated hatred toward Yiannopoulos in particular may have something to do with the controversial poll he recently ran on his Twitter feed where he asking the public if they would rather their child have cancer or feminism. Cancer won.)
But their child-like fits of celebration proved to be in vain: before the attempts to sabotage the pundit by Twitter, the outspoken Breitbart editor had roughly 120,000 followers; currently Yiannopoulos is sitting pretty with over 141,000.
Yiannopoulos’ “checkmark” is still missing and Twitter has yet provide a reason as to why the removal occurred in the first place, although Twitter’s new regulations pertaining to “hate speech” seem to be the culprit. But in fitting fashion, Yiannopoulos has added his own “verified” check—a black “x.”
For the time being, the blunt, unapologetic conservative is spending his time blowing up and tweeting about Twitter’s recent dismal financial performance since, according to Yiannopoulos, they “messed with the wrong faggot.”