Twitter has received a lot of bad publicity recently for the way it deals with harassment, but this weekend, the company made the internet a slightly less hateful place. Charles Johnson, a troll and conservative self-proclaimed journalist, had his account permanently suspended after he asked for help in a quest to "take out" a prominent racial-justice activist.
Johnson is well known for an astonishing array of terrible behavior, both on- and offline: He posted personal information about a woman he falsely accused of being the subject of Rolling Stone's retracted UVA rape story; he released personal information about two New York Times reporters after falsely accusing them of maliciously revealing private data about Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson, and he suggested that the deadly Amtrak crash in Philadelphia was somehow linked to the train conducter's sexuality.
The final straw? On Sunday, Johnson encouraged his supporters to donate to his website to help "take out" DeRay McKesson, a Black Lives Matter activist who has organized in Ferguson and Baltimore. And, he once offered to pay for photos of a U.S. senator's ailing wife, inside her nursing home. He's not a good person.
Johnson has been kicked off Twitter before — five times now — and by Monday he was already back online tweeting under different handles. At least, he was until Twitter caught him and suspended those accounts, too.
Unfortunately, there's nothing to keep Johnson or any of his awful supporters from registering new accounts and spreading bile until someone notices, even if that is a violation of the site's rules. And, Johnson told Re/Code that he's been welcomed back after a ban like this before. For now, without Johnson and his army of 25,000 followers, the world is a slightly nicer place.
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