Thread by @Noahpinion

Legendary Nazi troll Ricky Vaughn, whose Twitter mobs finally convinced me to implement my "block anyone" policy, has been identified as a preppy upper-class East Coast dude living in New York:
m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a…

I remember the day. It was in 2015, and I wrote a thread about how America needed to construct a new, polyracial national identity.

Naturally, Ricky and his boys considered the idea that "American" could come to mean more than just white people as a form of "white genocide".

Hundreds of Nazis promptly swarmed into my feed (and my emails), blasting me with anti-Semitic cartoons and the occasional death threat and such.

I those days I still believed in the idea that everyone should get their say, that everyone is worth talking to. So I engaged.

I spent ALL DAY talking to Ricky. Explaining why I think a transition to a polyracial American identity will help all Americans, white Americans included.

He was actually calm and affable. By itself, the discussion would have been worth having.

But we were not by ourselves.

Ricky kept quote-tweeting my tweets. That caused hundreds of his anonymous troll followers to swarm my mentions. They started replying to a bunch of other unrelated tweets of mine, with the same Nazi cartoons and threats and whatever.

My followers were horrified...

I realized that due to Ricky's quote-tweeting and the mob he summoned, my regular followers were being forced to view Nazi propaganda. And there was no way to stop it without blocking both them AND him.

So that day, I changed my approach to Twitter forever. I blocked Ricky. I hand-blocked 300 Nazis who had invaded my feed. It took almost an hour.

It was worth it.

Now I've used Twitter Block Chain, the chrome extension, to block 50,000 followers of alt-right meme accounts, and let me tell you, it has been so worth it.

People in my feed can talk about economics again. Or other fun stuff. They don't have to worry about Nazi attacks.

Moral of the story: The goal of some people's "speech" is to interrupt, silence, intimidate, disrupt, and in every way to smash and destroy other people's speech. The quality of our public forums can only be maintained by filtering out people like Ricky Vaughn.

Slowly, I think the world - even some of the "free speech" fundamentalists - are coming around to my point of view.

Real freedom of speech MUST include freedom from the thugs of the online world.

Happy blocking!

(end)