Far-right social commentator Katie Hopkins has been permanently suspended from Twitter, the social media platform has confirmed.
The British critic, TV personality and former columnist for The Sun newspaper was removed for violating Twitter's hateful conduct policy, a spokesperson for the site told The Guardian.
“Keeping Twitter safe is a top priority for us," the spokesperson said. "Abuse and hateful conduct have no place on our service and we will continue to take action when our rules are broken."
The exact rules Hopkins, 45, violated have not been detailed, but Twitter's policy states that users must not "promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease".
Hopkins's most recent tweets had taken aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, and she regularly takes an anti-immigration and pro-Brexit stance.
Hopkins, who had more than 1.1 million followers, was previously suspended from Twitter for a week in January, after anti-racism campaigners complained that her posts constituted hate speech.
The right-wing commentator, who rose to notoriety after appearing on the UK version of reality show The Apprentice, is widely known as an Islamophobe.
In July 2016, following the terrorist attack in Nice, Hopkins tweeted, “Islam disgusts me”; she has described Sadiq Khan as the “Muslim mayor of Londonistan”; and in 2017, she was forced to leave the radio station LBC after calling for a “final solution” in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing.
In 2016, the Mail Online – the digital arm of the Daily Mail newspaper – had to pay out £150,000 (Dh680,350) to a British Muslim family after Hopkins falsely accused them of extremism.
In 2018, she was forced to apply for insolvency after being ordered to pay £24,000 in damages to Jack Monroe, plus £107,000 in legal costs, after Hopkins wrongly accused the British food writer of supporting the defacement of war memorials.
