NEW YORK | Under a barrage of hateful posts on Twitter, “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones said she was “in a personal hell” and urged the social networking service to do more to eradicate abuse.
In a series of posts Monday night, Jones said she had been pummeled with racist tweets. She retweeted numerous tweets directed at her with pictures of apes.
Jones said the messages were deeply hurtful and brought her to tears. The “Saturday Night Live” cast member called on Twitter to strengthen guidelines and for users to “stop letting the ignorant people be the loud ones.”
“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,” Twitter said in a statement. “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.”
The recently released “Ghostbusters” has spawned an unusual amount of vitriol online. Many, however, came to Jones’ defense, tweeting under the hashtag “LoveForLeslieJ.”