After Twitter announced late Wednesday that it planned to overhaul its process for verifying accounts, the site started yanking that big blue check mark from a number of prominent far-right users, who proceeded to lose their minds in spectacular fashion.
Some, like Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, the former BuzzFeed staffer turned alt-right weirdo, were permanently banned. Gionet, apparently at wit’s end, dealt with the loss the only way he knew how: by livestreaming his breakdown an an In-N-Out Burger and randomly screaming at innocent passersby.
But Laura Loomer, an ex-employee of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe’s right-wing sting operation, but who’s probably best known for crashing a New York City performance of “Julius Caesar” to own the libs, took the loss of her verification especially hard, suggesting, of course, that this is basically just how that movie about the Holocaust begins.
When a verified Twitter user ironically responded that, perhaps, something happening on the internet is not at all like the genocide claimed the lives of six million Jews, Loomer doubled down magnificently:
Although neo-Nazi figures like Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, who organized the white supremacist rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, were stripped of their verification, they remain active on the site. So like most things Twitter does to appear like it’s addressing harassment and abuse on the site, the move so far seems mostly like an effort to stop appearing to tacitly endorse the worst people online—without actually barring them from the service that’s in no small part contributed to their rise.