Bumble Bans Alt Right Darling Jack Pobosiec In a Very Public Way

By Joe Berkowitz

It’s not a great day to be Jack Posobiec.

 

The alt-right figurehead, perhaps most notable for his role in perpetuating the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, was kicked off the dating app, Bumble, earlier this afternoon. Incredibly enough, his day proceeded to get even worse immediately afterward.

It all started when Twitter user Lindsey Ledford, a cybersecurity engineer, posted the below tweet.

Having your account on a dating site exposed is already tough enough for the average gentlemen, but it becomes much more difficult when you have the visibility of the guy who allegedly planted a “Rape Melania” sign at an anti-Trump rally to create a conservative outrage story, and who had Papa John’s cater his wedding rehearsal dinner when they briefly became the so-called official pizza of the alt right. (That wedding was two months ago, by the way.)

After Ledford recognized Posobiec and tweeted about her encounter with him on the app, Bumble inquired further and Ledford explained just who it was they had let on their platform.

 

Within 45 minutes of doing some research on Posobiec, an alt-right operative whom Donald Trump retweeted as recently as January 14, the team at Bumble announced they were removing Posobiec from the platform. The tweet announcing so, embedded below, has been retweeted 70 times in the last hour and a half.

While Twitter has had ongoing issues creating policies for when to suspend, un-verify, or excommunicate its many alt-right/white supremacist users, Bumble’s speedy reaction time here suggests it will not provide a similar safe haven. Fast Company is reaching out to Bumble for comment and will update accordingly.

UPDATE: A representative from Bumble has confirmed that Pobosiec has been removed from the platform. His ouster is a continuation of the company’s long history of banning users whose behavior goes against its core values, and has nothing to do with the size of Posobiec’s profile. In addition to reactive measures like today’s banning, Bumble has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to devise a list of keywords associated with hate groups that the company searches to weed out certain users. After Ledford tagged the company on Twitter, Bumble confirmed that the account actually was Pobosiec’s–and not someone posing as him–before removing him.

 

 

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