YouTuber's viral prank on 'Britain's biggest b***h' Katie Hopkins
Right-wing media personality and provocateur Katie Hopkins has found herself as the butt of a very elaborate joke carried out by a YouTube prankster.
The self described “biggest bitch in Britain” has been accused by critics of spreading hate against minorities, particularly on social media where her tweets have even been shared by US president Donald Trump.
One of those critics is YouTuber Josh Pieters, who managed to pull off an elaborate stunt three months in the making that culminated in presenting Ms Hopkins with an award that amounted to a not-so subtle dig.
The fake award was dubbed the Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy, which when abbreviated into an acronym, spelled out a particularly uncouth pejorative.
Seemingly unwise to the joke, Ms Hopkins accepted the award and delivered a speech to a small room of attendees.
An edited clip of the speech posted to social media included comments from Ms Hopkins that suggested Muslims “raped their own mothers” and that “epileptics are all weirdos, they’re up there with the Asians.”
It was described as “genuinely shocking and disgusting” when posted online.
It hasn’t been a great week for the woman who has earned a lot of detractors, for doing things such as likening African migrants to cockroaches in the British media.
She has now been temporarily kicked off social media site Twitter. As of Friday morning, a vast majority of her tweets had been deleted from her feed.
Ms Hopkins’ account has more than one million followers, having survived a series of Twitter takedowns that has seen a number of high profile right-wing commentators banned from the platform in recent years.
“We take enforcement action against any account that is violative of our rules – which includes violations of our hateful conduct policy and abusive behaviour policy,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
However the ban does not appear permanent.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which met with Twitter in an effort to get Ms Hopkins removed from site welcomed the move.
“We are pleased that preliminary action appears to have been taken by Twitter against the identity-based hate actor, Katie Hopkins, following productive discussions with Twitter’s UK office,” its CEO Imran Ahmed said in a statement.
Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.
You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and download the Yahoo News app from the App Store or Google Play.
