My Two Cents: The Leslie Jones Twitter Incident

I can't tell you how much I'm both upset and sad about what happened to actress Leslie Jones on Twitter this Monday (July 18th).

I was actually on there that day, I had returned to Twitter on July 15th after taken a month long break but it certainly felt like I should have continued on with my break. The Twitter incident with Leslie Jones made me so mad, instead of her enjoying the fact that Ghostbusters had a good opening weekend she was bombarded with horrible racist and sexist tweets all day and night on Monday. And the even sadder point is that Twitter did absolutely nothing to help her. She had to deal with this on her own. Fans (including myself) sent the actress positive tweets but that was unfortunately doing nothing to counteract the nonstop negative tweets she was receiving.

The negativity is one of the main reasons why I took a break from Twitter. Since Monday, Twitter did try to do some damage control, on Tuesday they placed a permanent ban on the guy who led the attack. Well that's a good start but what about all the others that harassed and attacked her.

Twitter did release a statement:

"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."


Ever since the announcement that the rebooted Ghostbusters was going to be all female, the movie has received an overwhelming amount of sexist comments, articles and posts. However, since the release of the movie, those criticizing the film and its cast have nothing to really talk about since the movie did well.

My Two Cents is Leslie Jones did nothing wrong, many have criticized how she handled the situation. Yes, she could have blocked the losers and cowards and said nothing but instead she chose to expose all the horrible tweets she was receiving. She chose not to stay silent and I commend her for standing up against this hatred.

Leslie Jones is supposed to be on today's episode of The Wendy Williams Show, I going to try to catch it. Be sure to check your local listings for the time.