Milo Yiannopoulos

Milo Yiannopoulos is a writer and speaker who was editor of Breitbart Tech, the technology section of Breitbart News, until his resignation in February 2017. He was permanently suspended from Twitter in July 2016 and removed from Facebook and Instagram in May 2019. The Library of Congress name authority record gives his date of birth as 18 October 1984 and his birthplace as Kent, England, and records the variant names Milo Hanrahan and Milo Andreas Wagner.

Breitbart and Gamergate

Yiannopoulos wrote about the Gamergate dispute for Breitbart from 1 September 2014, when the site published a column of his on the conflict within video-game journalism and criticism. By July 2016 NPR described his role as tech editor at Breitbart News; Breitbart’s own statement of 21 February 2017 gives his title as editor of Breitbart Tech.

Twitter Suspension, July 2016

Twitter permanently suspended his account, @Nero, on 20 July 2016. In a statement emailed to NPR, Twitter said: “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.” The suspension followed a campaign of racist and abusive messages directed at the actress Leslie Jones, who wrote that the messages had prompted her to leave the platform.

Yiannopoulos denied breaking Twitter’s rules, saying he had been suspended “without evidence of wrongdoing and without explanation,” and characterised the decision as “political, plain and simple.”

February 2017

Three things happened in the space of about thirty-six hours, each with a first-party record.

On 20 February 2017 the American Conservative Union rescinded his invitation to speak at that year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Chairman Matt Schlapp’s statement read: “Due to the revelation of an offensive video in the past 24 hours condoning pedophilia, the American Conservative Union has decided to rescind the invitation of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference.” He added that “there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.” Yiannopoulos posted on Facebook the same day denying that he supports pedophilia.

Hours later Simon & Schuster cancelled his book. The publisher’s statement read in full: “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.” The book had been announced in December 2016 and was listed for June 2017 at $26. More than 100 Simon & Schuster authors had objected to the deal, and the author Roxane Gay had withdrawn a book of her own from the publisher. He published Dangerous himself later in 2017; the Library of Congress catalogues it under 2017 with the title page byline “Milo”.

On 21 February 2017 he announced at a New York press conference that he was resigning as editor of Breitbart Tech: “I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone.” Breitbart’s own statement said he had notified the company that morning and that it had accepted his resignation.

Three weeks earlier, on 1 February 2017, a scheduled appearance at the University of California, Berkeley had been cancelled on safety grounds after protesters broke windows and started a fire.

Facebook and Instagram Removal, May 2019

On 2 May 2019 Facebook removed Yiannopoulos from Facebook and Instagram under its “dangerous individuals and organizations” policy, alongside Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones and Infowars, Paul Nehlen, Paul Joseph Watson and Laura Loomer. The removals extended to fan pages and related accounts. Facebook said only that “the process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

The Charlottesville Subpoena

The plaintiffs in Sines v. Kessler, the civil suit arising from the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, served Yiannopoulos with a subpoena on 5 November 2019 seeking recordings and communications relating to the rally and to the defendant Richard Spencer. The dispute over his compliance was litigated in the Southern District of New York as Sines v. Yiannopoulos, No. 20 Misc. 241 (KPF).

The record set out in Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s opinion of 14 October 2020 is unusually detailed about how he worked after leaving Breitbart. He told the plaintiffs in February 2020 that he had nothing responsive and asserted journalistic privilege; in April 2020 he published material on YouTube that was responsive to the subpoena, and reposted it on Telegram saying there was “[m]uch, much more to come.” At a hearing on 29 July 2020 he stated on the record that he had been “messing [the plaintiffs] around a bit.” The court, noting that he was proceeding without a lawyer, declined to find that he had waived the privilege and held that he had sufficiently invoked the qualified federal journalist’s privilege, since he had acquired the source while salaried at Breitbart and Breitbart “does not primarily engage in private lobbying, regardless of its editorial vision.” The same opinion recorded that his shifting account of the number of his sources “has no journalistic benefit.”

On 7 December 2020 the court granted the renewed motion to compel and ordered him to disclose the names and locations of two confidential sources within fourteen days, adding that it “will view a violation of this Order through the lens of its contempt powers.”

What Is Not Established Here

This page previously carried a number of claims that no source located in this audit supports, and they have been removed.

The followerCount field asserted “300k+ Twitter followers at peak (before ban)”. No record for that figure was found, and the account has been gone since 2016; the field is deleted rather than estimated. The primaryPlatforms list included “breitbart”, which is not a platform in this repository — Breitbart News is a media entry — so it was removed; Telegram was added because the 2020 court record documents his use of it.

The description “British-American” was removed: his British birth is on record with the Library of Congress, but nothing found here establishes American citizenship. The affiliations “Dangerous Faggot Tour” and “MILO” were removed as unverified entity names. The role “Provocateur” was removed as a characterization rather than a role; NPR’s 2016 report calls him a “self-styled provocateur,” which is a description belonging to a source, not to this project.

The body previously asserted a date range — “Technology Correspondent (2014-2016)”, “Rise to Prominence (2015-2017)” — and a promotion to senior editor. No record was found fixing when he joined Breitbart or when his title changed. What is documented is that he was writing for Breitbart by 1 September 2014, that NPR described him as tech editor in July 2016, and that Breitbart’s own resignation notice of 21 February 2017 called him editor of Breitbart Tech. The date ranges are gone.

Also removed: the claim that he coined or centred his campus work on “cultural Marxism”; the assertion that he served “as a bridge between internet subcultures and mainstream Republican Party politics”; the claims about leveraging platform algorithms, monetizing controversy, and appealing to “young male audiences feeling alienated from mainstream politics”; and the generalised statement that he “directed coordinated online campaigns.” These were interpretive claims with no source attached. What Twitter said, in its own words, is quoted above; that is the extent of what a platform operator has stated on the record here.

The February 2017 audio recording that prompted the ACU and Simon & Schuster decisions is described on this page only as the ACU described it and as he responded to it. This page does not characterise its contents beyond those two attributed statements.

One item could not be checked: reporting that he worked as an unpaid intern in Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional office in 2022 appears in several outlets, but every accessible copy was behind a 403 and web.archive.org returned 503 for every playback attempt during this audit. The claim is therefore absent from the page rather than cited to a source that was not read.