Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones has urged Twitter to take more action against online trolls after she was subjected to horrific racist abuse.
The American actress said she felt numb as she shared a string of racist tweets she had been sent on social media.
“I’m not stupid to not know racism exists,” she wrote on Twitter. “And I know it will probably live on way after me. But we have to make people take responsibility.
“Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that.
“You can see on the profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It’s not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported.”
The Saturday Night Live star said she now understood why some celebrities did not have Twitter accounts and insisted trolls must “take responsibility for the hate they spew”.
“Stop letting the ignorant people be the loud ones,” she wrote. “Y’all I got more love than hate but they are louder.
“I feel like I’m in a personal hell. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. It shouldn’t be like this.”
The hashtag LoveForLeslieJ began trending on Twitter after Jones highlighted the abuse she was suffering online.
Ghostbusters director Paul Feig tweeted: “Leslie Jones is one of the greatest people I know. Any personal attacks against her are attacks against us all. #LoveForLeslieJ.”
A Twitter spokesman said: “This type of abusive behaviour is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others.
“We rely on people to report this type of behaviour to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse.
“We realise we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.”
Jones is part of the all-female line-up in the new Ghostbusters movie, along with Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon.
They replaced the quartet of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson, who starred in the original 1980s film franchise.
The announcement of the new female cast was met by criticism online from some Ghostbusters fans, while the film’s trailer attracted more than 900,000 “dislikes” on YouTube – a record number for a movie trailer on the website.
But the film’s stars brushed off the criticism at the premiere in Los Angeles earlier this month, with McCarthy saying she found the negative reaction “peculiar”.