Pharma hate figure Martin Shkreli suspended from Twitter

One-time pharmaceutical exec and distasteful windup merchant Martin Shkreli has had his Twitter account suspended after a Twitter spokesman alleged he had harassed a female journalist on the site.

Lauren Duca, a freelance journalist who writes for Teen Vogue and a host of left-wing American media outlets, including Vice, The New Yorker and The New Inquiry, publicly rejected a joke invitation from Shkreli to attend US president-elect Donald Trump’s formal inauguration.

She posted a screenshot of Shkreli’s two Twitter direct messages to her and added the comment “I would rather eat my own organs”.

I would rather eat my own organs pic.twitter.com/IgeCRZqk8w

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) January 5, 2017

Shkreli responded by turning his Twitter account into a mock online shrine to Duca, photoshopping his own face over that of Duca’s husband in a picture of the two of them together.

A Twitter spokesman told the BBC that Shkreli’s suspension from the site was “related to Ms Duca’s case”.

Your correspondent suspects there is probably far more history between the two than is immediately obvious from the public exchange, but this hasn’t stopped a slew of news websites from breathlessly reheating stories about Shkreli raising the price of an anti-HIV drug that his former employers held the manufacturing licence for. In 2015 the price of Turings Pharmaceuticals drug Daraprim increased from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill.

Shkreli is currently on bail and awaiting trial over securities fraud charges in the US. American federal prosecutors allege that his conduct with previous pharmaceutical companies amounted to running a Ponzi scheme. Shkreli denies the charges and claims he was improperly targeted by prosecutors after the Daraprim scandal.

It is interesting to see Twitter publicly taking sides in politically-charged web spats like this. Shkreli is an attention-seeker; that much is obvious from the firestorm of controversy that the Daraprim scandal quite rightly caused. Suspending him just gets him talked about more, which is what he wants, and the irony of this story’s very existence in that regard is pretty strong.

Twitter has previously intervened in online disputes on the site, including permanently suspending veteran windup merchant and attention-seeker Milo Yiannopoulos for “inciting targeted abuse of individuals” after Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones was pelted with racist abuse by Yiannopoulos' followers.

As is common with all other social media platforms, Twitter vigorously insists that it does not exercise editorial control over what happens on its site, as otherwise it would become legally liable for all of it.

Meanwhile, outside in London as this story is being written, it is raining. Above the clouds, the sun shines. In an hour or so the sun will have set, and in another 15 hours after that, it will have risen again. So the world continues turning, regardless of “he said/she said” arguments on social media. ®