KATIE HOPKINS - OUSTED TROLL OF THE MONTH

The Troll of the Month is an incident we choose every month to expose racist and anti-religious haters and to show positive outcomes in the fight against intolerance in Europe.

Recently, British media personality Katie Hopkins was permanently suspended from Twitter. This action came after multiple temporary suspensions of Hopkins’ account due to violations of Twitter’s hate speech policies, with her most recent suspension just months prior in January 2020. Twitter did not point to any specific tweets as rationale for her suspension, however, Hopkins has a clear history of spreading hate speech on the platform.

Some of her most well-known incitements of religious hate speech as documented by the BBC include her call for a “final solution” for terrorists after the Manchester bombing and her unsubstantiated claim of a Muslim family, who was denied entrance to the U.S. for a Disneyland trip, as being extremists. Additionally, she has publicly declared her support for U.S. President Donald Trump, who openly called for ceasing the entrance of Muslims into the U.S. during his 2016 presidential campaign.

In one particularly notable incident back in 2015, Katie Hopkins wrote an opinion piece for The Sun in response to a shipwreck of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean which was overtly anti-migrant. Her piece received widespread backlash from many public figures and organizations due to its outright xenophobic tone and attempt to spread hate, racism, and support for violent solutions to be acted out against immigrants. In response to this hateful article, The Society of Black Lawyers and the editor of The Sun filed a complaint of incitement to racial hatred to the Metropolitan police.

Katie Hopkins’ content has even appeared on Canadian alt-right media website, Rebel Media, as a means of promoting a “counter-jihad” stance in the context of an “us vs them” dynamic intended to exclude Muslims from Europe. Also, she has recently been spotted spreading hate in the far-right magazine “Frontpage”. Unfortunately, the use of known divisive personalities like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins within right-wing platforms often has the power to influence global events, such as was seen in the election of Donald Trump and Brexit.

As a result of her continued use of hate speech, Katie Hopkins has been fired from numerous positions within the media industry. Specifically, she was fired from The Sun in 2015 for comparing migrants to cockroaches, she was fired from the LBC in May 2017 for her tweet calling for a “final solution”, and she was fired from The Daily Mail in November 2017.

Throughout the duration of the Get the Trolls Out! project, Hopkins has crossed our radar far too many times due to her continued use of dangerous hate speech. We have reacted to and debunked her hateful content for many years. In fact, this time last year she was named our Troll of the Month for her propaganda movie “Homelands”, which was blatantly Islamophobic, xenophobic, and pitted the Jewish and Muslim communities against one another. This latest sanction on Katie Hopkins’ powerful ability to perpetuate hate is significant, as it is a permanent ban from a social media platform where Hopkins had over a million followers.