Instagram removed a post from Milo Yiannopoulos Thursday praising the attempted mail bomb attacks on CNN and leading Democrats. The removed post also lamented how a similar device was not sent to the Daily Beast.
Instagram told the former Breitbart tech editor that his comments constituted a “community guidelines” violation and his account faced the possibility of suspension if it happened again.
“We removed your post because it doesn’t follow out Community Guidelines. If you violate our guidelines again, your account may be restricted or disabled,” the company said.
The news was first reported by Yiannopoulos himself on Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpXxFwVg1JI/?hl=en&taken-by=milo.yiannopoulos
“It doesn’t matter whether your post violates their terms of service or not — only whether enough social justice warriors complain about it,” said Yiannopoulos. “Mob rule.”
Milo has already been banned from Twitter. His once mighty influence on social media largely collapsed after he parted ways with Breitbart and his own media company was a commercial failure.
Yiannopoulos and Instagram did not immediately respond to request for comment Friday morning. The imbroglio began after Yiannopoulos posted an image of himself along with the following caption:
“Just catching up with news of all these pipe bombs, disgusting and sad (that they didn’t go off and the Daily Beast didn’t get one),” he said. Yiannopoulos later asserted he had been joking.
The “joke” didn’t sit well with Daily Beast staffers however, with the site’s resident right wing watcher Will Sommer writing an angry article declaring “Instagram Refuses to Pull Down Milo Post Praising Mail Bombs.”
“Instagram said it would not remove a post from right-wing figure Milo Yiannopoulos praising the recent mail bombs sent to prominent Democratic officials, even after the post was reported as hate speech,” said Sommer, noting that the company told him at the time it did not violate the community guidelines.
The piece was later fully reworked after the Instagram removal, though as of Friday morning the original URL still remained.
On Friday, multiple outlets reported that an 11th and 12th mail bomb were uncovered in Florida addressed to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former National Intelligence chief James Clapper.