Actress Leslie Jones returns to Twitter after online harassment

“Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones returned to Twitter Thursday after abandoning the platform earlier this week when she was the target of racist and misogynistic harassment.

Her return comes days after Twitter permanently banned the conservative writer who is said to have sparked the abusive messages sent to Jones. The comedian’s comments upon her return did not reference the writer or his suspension.

{mosads}“Welp…a bitch thought she could stay away,” she said. “But who else is gonna live tweet Game of Thrones!!”

Earlier this week, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Jones documented her harassment when users sent the comedian, who is black, photos of monkeys and apes and made other derogatory remarks about her. She urged Twitter to bolster its response to the abuse before indicating that she was pulling back from the social network.

“I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart,” she finally wrote early on Tuesday morning. “All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today…wrong.”

The company has struggled for a long time to fight abuse on its platform, despite acknowledgements from top executives that something needs to be done about the issue.

But Jones’s high profile put Twitter in a position where it seemingly had to respond. Executive Jack Dorsey personally reached out to Jones, asking her to contact him, and the company pledged to continue investing in efforts to fight harassment.

Then, on Tuesday night, Twitter announced it had gone a step further by permanently suspending Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative writer who was seen as having sparked the campaign of vitriol against Jones. Yiannopoulos — who used the handle @nero — is a popular figure on the so-called alt-right who for years, critics allege, used social media to egg on his followers against different people.

“People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,” said a Twitter spokesperson in a statement released when Yiannopoulos was banned. “But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”

“Over the past 48 hours in particular, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of accounts violating these policies and have taken enforcement actions against these accounts, ranging from warnings that also require the deletion of Tweets violating our policies to permanent suspension.”