‘Ghostbusters’ star Leslie Jones exposes racist harassment on Twitter

Leslie Jones has had enough.

On Monday afternoon, the Ghostbusters star and Saturday Night Live cast member tweeted that she was tired of receiving constant harassing messages with overt racist and sexist imagery.

Jones announced that she was going to stop blocking her Twitter harassers so that their tweets and comments could be seen publicly in order to expose their offensive nature.

Jones—whose summer blockbuster remake of the classic 1980s film has enraged sexist men due to its all-female cast—then began to retweet some of the most vile messages directed her way. Many of them compared Jones to an ape or monkey, called her ugly, used racist slurs like n**ger or ‘savage,’ or repeatedly conflated her with slain zoo animal Harambe.

Almost immediately after seeing the slew of retweets (as well as the fresh piles of hot, racist garbage comments that followed every single one of Jones’ tweets), fans sprung into action, reporting the accounts en masse in an attempt to get Twitter’s safety team to remove them all for violating guidelines.

But as many of Jones’ supportive fans pointed out, when one troll account is blocked another one arises to replace it. 

https://twitter.com/PatTrudeau/status/755165608795181056

Jones went off on many of her harassers, repeatedly giving them a piece of her mind before blocking and reporting the offending accounts, and a number of supporters began using the hashtag #LoveforLeslieJ. 

But the incident raised a question that has been asked over and over for years: Why aren’t there better anti-harassment protections in place on social media?

Just after midnight, Jones said she was leaving Twitter. It was unclear whether she meant for now or forever. 

The Daily Dot reached out to Jones for further comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Update 7:39pm CT, July 19: Includes Jones’s latest tweet about leaving Twitter.