Instagram Refuses To Take Down Posts Praising Mail Bombs, Says The Posts Meet Community Guidelines

Instagram has refused to take down posts from alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos lamenting that explosive devices mailed to various Democratic politicians and news organizations didn’t go off, even after the posts were reported by users as hate speech according to The Daily Beast.

Yiannopoulos posted a picture of himself on Thursday captioning the photo for his 386,000 followers to say, “Just catching up with news of all these pipe bombs. Disgusting and sad (that they didn’t go off, and the daily beast didn’t get one).”

The caption is clearly referring to a suspicious package sent to CNN headquarters in New York City meant for former CIA Director John Brennan, as well as packages sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, California Senator Maxine Waters, Democratic donor George Soros, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and actor Robert De Niro’s restaurant, all reported in the Inquisitr.

All of the targets of the bombs so far have been vocal critics of President Trump.

Despite Instagram users reporting the post as violating the community guidelines and his own followers worrying in the comments if the post would get him banned, Instagram has refused to take down the post.

The company said the post “does not violate our Community Guidelines.”

Yiannopoulos made a similar post on Facebook, which also remains up.

Instagram didn’t respond to further requests from The Daily Beast for comments, nor did their parent company Facebook.

Yiannopoulos has a history of being an extremely polarizing figure on the right.

He was banned from Twitter in 2016 and was forced out of his position as an editor at Breitbart after he made positive comments about pedophilia and lost the support of the Mercer family, the conservative billionaires funding him, over his links to right-wing extremist groups.

While Yiannopoulos has certainly fallen from his once lofty position, he still retains a relatively large following and still does speaking tours, his next upcoming one alongside conservative firebrand Ann Coulter.

According to The Verge, he posted on Facebook wishing harm to journalists, writing, “they are scum and I will not mourn them.”

He has a history of posting vile things on social media that he later claims are satire, most notably saying he couldn’t “wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight” before denying his words might have had any influence on the gunman who opened fire on Capital Gazette journalists, according to Newsweek.

He claimed his “vigilante death squads” comment was tongue in cheek, meant to say “f**k off” to a “few hostile journalists.”

“Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a ‘threat,’ I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious,” he wrote.