In a perfect world, Leslie Jones would’ve spent her Monday celebrating the release of her new childhood-ruining movie, Ghostbusters: Attack of the Feminmiminismsists, but instead she’s putting up with some bullshit on Twitter. Monday night, Jones exposed and called out the insanely racist abuse she’s been receiving.
(God, I hope so too.)
These alt-right troll ass motherfuckers are even co-opting the formerly good “Dicks Out For Harambe” meme as a way to harass her.
To the people who would say something as myopic as “don’t read the comments,” Jones has a response for that too:
Twitter is notoriously bad at dealing with abuse; it is, however, diligently removing the racist tweets that Jones is calling out, probably because she’s a celebrity. Jones rightly points out that it still isn’t enough, calling attention to the larger culture of permissible abuse on Twitter.
Twitter allowing so much racist—and while we’re at it, sexist—bullshit to remain on their site makes it a breeding ground for abusive content. If the landscape of Twitter continues to be this unbearably shitty for women of color, the site will alienate (and ultimately lose) users like Jones.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update this post when they respond.
Update July 19, 5:33pm: Twitter responded to the AP:
“This type of abusive behavior is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others,” said a spokesperson for Twitter.
“We rely on people to report this type of behavior to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse. We realize we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.”