Milo Yiannopoulos banned from Facebook for hate speech
Right-wing British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos answers questions during a speech at Parliament House in Canberra on December 5, 2017 (MARK GRAHAM/AFP/Getty)
Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from Facebook, as the social network cracked down on far-right figures.
The gay former Breitbart editor was ejected from Facebook on Thursday (May 2) as part of a wider crackdown that also saw the site boot InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and far-right activist Laura Loomer.
Milo Yiannopoulos banned under hate speech rules
Facebook said in a statement: “We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology.
“The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”
The social network had been one of the few online refuges for Yiannopoulos, who was permanently banned from Twitter in 2016 after accusations that he encouraged racist abuse against Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
Right-wing British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos
Facebook did not explain what specific content Yiannopoulos had posted that violated its rules, but according to The Verge noted he had praised British far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
Once seen as a key far-right influencer who was closely affiliated with Trump administration figures, Yiannopoulos has seen a sharp decline in public profile.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a decline in influence
Many right-wing figures cut ties with Yionnopoulos in 2017, when he was accused of endorsing pederasty in a series of video clips.
In one video Yiannopoulos attacked the age of consent as an “arbitrary one-size-fits-all policing of culture”.
He claimed: “In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”
In just 24 hours after those remarks, the columnist was dropped from far-right news website Breitbart News, had a book deal axed by Simon & Schuster, and was removed from the line-up of the Republican CPAC conference.
Yiannopoulos would subsequently file and then drop a $10 million lawsuit against publisher Simon & Schuster.
In October 2017, Yiannopoulos married his husband in Hawaii, despite his own expressed opposition to same-sex marriage. Weeks after his own wedding, Yiannopoulos told Australians to vote against equal marriage.
In December 2018, it was reported that Yiannopoulos was more than $2m in debt after the failure of several business ventures.
The disgraced alt-right figure recently led an influx of controversial figures to join the UK Independence Party.
