Milo Yiannopoulos is still upset that Twitter removed the little blue verification check mark from his profile. I don’t even get what that is for, how to apply for one, or why anyone would bother, but it’s very, very important to Milo, and he’s been complaining bitterly about it for the past month now. It is an attack on his free speech, don’t you know, and we all know how important it is to these wankers to be able to shriek in public.
Just so you know how important this is, Milo crashed a White House press conference to confront the press secretary. My verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people,
he whined. This is a whole new level of obsession over petty trivia.
I’m speechless.
I think I’ll walk down to the coffeeshop for my morning pick-me-up, and they better not be out of bran muffins today — a man my age needs his fiber. But if they are, I’m just going to turn around and go to the airport, get a flight to Beijing, and demand that President Xi Jinping do something about it! So I might be distracted for a few days.
FYI: I made it to the coffeeshop, and they had ONE bran muffin left. It was so close. Jinping can count himself lucky tomorrow, that by such a narrow margin he has avoided an international incident as an outraged American stormed his office and demanded that he deal with the muffin shortfall.
…uh.
…what?
Shit. He actually believes that this is a legitimate issue, doesn’t he? I don’t know how to deal with this level of nonsense.
For someone who has been silenced, he sure is making a lot of noise.
Too bad Yiannopoulos ain’t.
This is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.
I know–let’s give Milo an award. He likes tokens of recognition. I nominate him for Most Whiny Loser of the Century.
Good to know he maintains his sterling record of becoming enraged by trivialities.
Be fair PZ, when your whole public image is based on jumping from one odious right-wing bandwagon to another you generally have to take the leap whenever you can make it. And if you stop shouting then you risk immediately becoming a complete irrelevance again.
To be honest I’m surprised he hasn’t found something obnoxious to say about the US presidential election, or our own EU referendum, or the immigrant crisis in Europe yet, but I guess he can’t find a way to feel sufficiently personally victimised by any of those things, so this will have to do. Though I’m surprised he hasn’t piped up about his beloved catholic church recently – I guess the whole self-hating gay catholic schtick got old quickly, and internet misogyny is a much surer route to modest tinpot infamy.
There is no right to limit a privileged man’s Freedom of Shriek
The whole world has to stop.
The whole world has to accept that man’s shriek as the final word on the subject.
The whole world should not point out the flaws in what was shrieked – That is another limit on a privileged man’s Freedom of Shriek.
The whole world cannot ignore and move on until the privileged man decides they can. If the privileged man never moves on then the world can never move on – ever.
Milo, if you don’ t like having your check mark taken away, boycott Twitter like any man of principle would.
*Ah, the welcome silence if that would happen*
Let me get this strate [sic]: Since the government is forbidden from restricting free speech, every publisher must publish everything they get submitted?
is Milo deliberately forgetting that the internet is the ultimate vehicle for free speech. That if one provider disallows you, there are many other providers that welcome publishing “alternative” viewpoints. This wasn’t invented with the internet, paper had it long before. If one newspaper rejected one’s article, the next one down the street would snap it up.
And talk about exageration [sic] Twitter took a check mark off his tweets. He can still tweet, but without the check mark? Isn’t Twitter allowed to checkmark the tweets they agree with and uncheck those they don’t? like complaining one’s book doesn’t have any recommends printed on the cover.
I sorry (smirk) but this all sounds like a 5 yr old complaining about ~~ anything ~~ pulling in phrases he’s heard to try to justify the complaint. waa waaa waaa
Won’t someone finally do something about the anti-SJW offense culture?!?
Oh wait, the Internet is still pretending to live in Bizarro World where it’s the social justice-minded who whine and throw tantrums over petty bullshit all day long.
Why is this guy?
Yes, lack of Bran Muffins, lack of Blue Blob of Pixals, and lack of the Fishmonger In Today’s Market, are all massive, massive. Massive problems requiring action by the UN Security Council, Teh Illuminati, and the Librarian.
Moderation?
Moi?
(emphasis mine)
Hmmmm, I don’t know. What do your libertarian friends say?
It’s supposed to verify that the person is who they say they are. It’s only for people who are famous, which leaves Milo out, really. You officially can’t apply for it — they’ll call you, I guess?
Given the nature of what it is, it shouldn’t really be taken away as a punishment, if that’s what happened — they should just suspend his account altogether.
The guy works for Breitbart. What more would you expect?
I still think you should at least call Kim Jong-un and complain about the coffee shop failing to deliver the muffin to you in bed.
As you have alluded to, Milo’s free speech remains intact. I don’t think the real reason he’s upset is because his free speech has been impinged upon. He’s still yelling and people can can still read and hear him just fine. The true underlying motive is that he feels unfairly treated because his status has been attacked. The absence of that blue check mark means he has been reduced to a lower institutional status on Twitter. The absent check mark represents a lost trophy of institutional recognition and respect as a celebrity and he’s pissed off that someone has managed to do this to him.
However, he still has an immense following of aggressive trolls at his command. So, he still has bucket loads of power.
And people still read his awful writing across the globe every day. Poor guy. His life is now a shambles.
This is one of those moments where all you can do is stare in shocked disbelief at the chaotic insanity that is humanity.
Sadly, I’ve been having more snore of these moments lately.
Edit “…more and more…”
Curse you autocorrect! You won this round!
Ever since the guberment nazies forced twitter to take away Milo’s tiny blue mark I can’t find them anywhere in society! ANYWHERE! It’s like they kidnapped him and are holding him in some stifling gulag where the rest of society can choose to judge the quality of his speech! It’s a travesty!
@ShowMetheData
I like “freedom of shriek”. It’s like the general social abstract of an individual’s frozen peaches.
To back up timberwraith I see this as a dominance display using hyperbole that Milo’s followers would be receptive to. He’s not so alpha in comparison to twitter which now has Sarkeesian cooties. He must get his blue mark back or the slide to betaville will be unavoidable (some of that is still in “MRAperbole”).
So, who does own the world’s smallest violin, and is it available for hire?
I saw the video of that, and perhaps the funniest part was that Josh Earnest clearly didn’t have a clue what Milo was talking about. (He did call on him by name.) So he waffled, and when Milo clued him in, he managed to waffle some more without actually being rude. Kudos to Earnest for not visibly eye-rolling!
@nelliebly
Given the recent(? still current?) “Moderation” problems, I assume poopyhead did have a consultation with President Xi Jinping… The world’s sole remaining bran muffin wasn’t enough, so everything, everything, is being held up until, um, another bran muffin! It’s the tentacled muffinarmageddon!! Or else!!!
Demoted from Important Twit to Unimportant Twit. That must hurt, poor fellow.
Fixed.
B-but no-platforming! Having any sort of standards or guidelines for what speech you endorse or feature is not only a violation of freeze peach, but also just an attempt to silence the viewpoint you’re afraid of.
The revenge of the Twitterati is near.
Is anyone else reminded of Kw*k with Milo’s whine? It’s like the Leica Rangefinder writ large.
Who???
Who?
It seems the newer level of petty obsession is talking about this Milo person. Slow day in the blogosphere?
And what is your opinion of Milo’s temper tantrum?
Milo works for Brietbart, and does a lot with GamerGate and related misogynist and racist scum on Twitter and Reddit, including trying to give them legitimacy with an actual magazine thing.
So, WhiteHatLurker, your comment is just an Argument From Ignorance style condescending snark regarding posting someone with a significant soapbox responsible for fomenting a lot of misogyny and harassment online.
You know, as many threats as have been made, it really seems like showing up uninvited at an event where the POTUS is present ought to not be something one can do…
@Beatrice #13
Good catch. Funny thing that small government, huh.
We are supposed to trust the free market with education, health care, poverty alleviation, …
Careful there, if taken literally that leads to an amazing echo-chamber effect: The whoever only speaks to like-minded people, never a dissenting word is said / heard. People known to, or suspected of, disagreeing are (at best) not-invited. People who do attend but disagree are (at best) never invited again.
On the other hand, at a press conference, restricting attendance to credentialed reporters is understandable. Now the question is how to, and who can, obtain the necessary credentials. This sort of restriction is abused in some parts of the world, but perhaps not-so-much in the States.
I don’t know, I think it’s permissible for a world leader to be able to have standards with who they meet with. “No-platforming” is bullshit in any context, but especially when you’re a person that a large part of the country considers worse than Hitler.
Much as I wish Obama had been there — I’m guessing he’d have been on to “next” after approximately one word, which would have been awesome — this was a briefing with the press secretary, not a full-fledged conference with the President.
@14 is correct on both counts: verified accounts are to verify that, yes, it’s *that* Stephen King / Taylor Swift / whomever. And because of that, I can’t see why you’d take it away from someone as a punishment; he’s still *that* Milo after all.
PZ is probably actually an appropriate level of famous for this; the big advantage it would confer is protection against someone registering e.g. “@pzmeyers” and impersonating him.
I think there are a few niceties that come with a verified account, like being able to (optionally) auto-ignore anyone else not verified; maybe that’s what Twitter thinks he doesn’t deserve.
@40: Verified accounts are about twitter making sure you are *who you say you are*. What kicked this off was Yiannopoulos changing his bio and tweeting that he had been hired as a senior content manager at Buzzfeed, during another one of his harassment campaigns.
Since his bio was now false, and he had made tweets claiming he was someone he wasn’t, Twitter removed the checkmark saying “this biography is accurate”. And they haven’t put it back even after he removed the lies because they don’t feel like it, and he’s a harassing asshole who makes their service worse. There’s no formal process to become verified, there’s no rules about how famous you have to be, beyond that people who beg for verification don’t usually get it. And him begging for it and sending people to harass twitter employees until they re-verify him? Makes Twitter *really* unlikely to want to do him any favours.
I continue to be dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of self-important arrogance it requires to go to a White House press conference and complain about twitter verification because his freezepeach is in peril.
There is also the puzzle of why Milo, being a citizen of Britain, thinks he is entitled to invoke any rights in regard to the first amendment.
I predict that he will not be attending any more WH press conferences, and that his name is now on a special list.
Really, why doesn’t Milo get in line with all the really important people who went to really important high school and who know other super-really-important people, and demand a Leica camera body as compensation for having his binkie taken away ?
@DLC, #43:
He wants the Leica camera AND for Twitter to keep its pretty check-mark graphic on his screen.
Me? I just want someone to sneak into his apartment, super-glue a round, blue, plastic cloud centered on a white check to a corner of his laptop’s screen and end our long national nightmare.