If the matador pricks the bull for long enough, the bull charges. But that doesn't mean the bull has won.
Twitter stepped neatly into Lord of the Shitlords Milo Yiannopolous's trap this week by permanently banning him from the service, thereby justifying his entire thesis that he is a lone flag carrier for "free speech" being persecuted by powerful forces.
Yiannopoulos is a sometimes-leader, sometimes-sort-of-mascot of the "alt-right," which is the new polite way to describe online racists. But as many profiles have sort of shown, he doesn't necessarily believe any of the things he tweets. His point is that all offensive speech, of whatever kind, should be permissible, and only people with the thickest skin should be able to survive in our world. He uses his Breitbart column for manifestos, his Twitter account to rally the troops, and speaking tours to rewards them for their loyalty.
I was once a First Amendment extremist, by the way, but I was 21. Now I understand that there's actually a lot of social value in trying not to be a jerk, because the position of "be hostile to everyone, always" ends up generating a society full of conflict, hate, and stress. That tends to boost the adrenaline and juice the pleasure centers of bored, young men, and make most other people unhappy.
Although Milo has been involved in nearly every high-profile harassment controversy on the Internet, for some inexplicable reason, Twitter decided to ban him yesterday for supposedly inciting the massive racial harassment of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. That reached a fever pitch after trolls apparently faked screenshots of Jones's Twitter account to make it look like she was tweeting racist and anti-Semitic filth.
Perhaps Milo is responsible for that, but only in the way dry timber is responsible for a forest fire. Banning Milo is like burning a witch and then saying you've done something about the plague. It makes him a scapegoat and a high-profile martyr while doing absolutely zero about the broader problem he represents, which is widespread, anonymous, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic abuse. Like a Mafia don in a friendly, minimum-security prison, Milo will have no problem ordering his legions from exile. In fact, his street cred has now improved.
Twitter's user base has been flat for the past five quarters in part because the company just can't get a handle on the simple tools it needs to prevent people from opening their browsers and feeling like they're under attack. Aside from a small cadre of adrenaline junkies, almost nobody wants to sit on the Internet and feel like they're being attacked all the time.
How to address this has been discussed for a long time. But it's not about ditching Milo and his ilk; it's about making them invisible to normal humans, so they can rant at each other without bothering anyone else. Extra points appear if they don't know they've been blocked. Even Reddit has these kinds of tools; it's called shadowbanning. Honestly, it's not like Reddit is all sweetness and light, but Twitter isn't even trying.
Milo's legions will not weaken because he can't tweet. Ultimately, the legions themselves are a symptom, not a cause, of the same disease that has brought us tweets from a racist website appearing on the big screen at the RNC and maniacs like Micah Johnson living out their sniper fantasies: a shattered society full of fear, a lack of trust and empathy, and no sense that we are all in it together.
Better blocking tools on Twitter might be arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but maybe your chair will be closer to the lifeboats. Internet culture reflects and amplifies societal trends. If we're going to have to reflect hate, because we can't help it, we might as well try not to amplify it.