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Twitter Singles Out Milo For Censorship Over Iconic Nice Image

by Ben Kew15 Jul 20160

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Twitter has hidden a tweet from Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos after he shared an iconic photo of an abandoned child’s doll following the Islamist terror attack in Nice last night in which 80 people were killed.

Yiannopoulos, who is a fierce critic of the role of Muslim migration in Western society, posted the photo with the caption “Europe’s Future, Under Islam.”  Milo was soon reprimanded by Twitter, who after “reviewing” the post, marked it as “possibly sensitive,” meaning that users cannot see the post until they manually click through to the content.

Milo was allowed to disable the content filter, but Twitter warned him that unless he flagged similar content as “sensitive” in the future, it could permanently install the content filter over all his media tweets, thus damaging his growth and engagement numbers.

In response, Yiannopoulos said it was another example of Twitter’s “slippery tactics,” calling them “cowards” for not just banning him from the site altogether.

Even more revealing is the fact that Twitter, which is known for its disdain of conservatives, had no problem with the photo being shared from a range of other news outlets, including the Huffington Post, The Independent, and NBC.

TIME’s Chelsea Matiash and the BBC’s Jeremy Vine were also apparently allowed to tweet the photo without punishment from Twitter. So why is Milo being treated differently? We asked Twitter’s press team, but they didn’t respond.

The site has previously targeted conservative media through actions such as de-verifying Yiannopoulos, and refusing to verify Breitbart’s official Twitter account of nearly 350,000 followers, despite CEO Jack Dorsey claiming that the company “stands for freedom of expression.”

This is all despite Breitbart last month being named the largest political news site on social media, smashing the likes of The Huffington Post, The Guardian and CNN with over one and a half million more engagements.

You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at ben@yiannopoulos.net


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