Sarah Jeong Joins the New York Times, Finds Herself the Subject of Coordinated Harassment ⇥ splinternews.com
What would it be like if we all deleted Facebook? What does the future of online privacy look like?Why can’t the tech industry diversify? Are monkeys allowed to sue over copyrights? And what in the world is #cockygate?
To answer questions like these, the editorial board will soon be turning to Sarah Jeong, who will join us in September as our lead writer on technology. Sarah will also collaborate with Susan Fowler Rigetti, our incoming tech op-ed editor, and Kara Swisher, our latest contributor on tech issues.
Jeong is one of my favourite writers; this is terrific news. Unfortunately, some goblins dug up old — and mostly funny — tweets that she posted, and deliberately took them out of context to imply that she’s racist. There are understandable contextual differences between her tweets and, for example, Rosanne Barr’s.
The Verge, Jeong’s current employer, published an editor’s note admonishing this reprehensible abuse campaign:
Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste their time by debating their malicious agenda. They take tweets and other statements out of context because they want to disrupt us and harm individual reporters. The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation, it’s intimidation.
So we’re not going to fall for these disingenuous tactics. And it’s time other newsrooms learn to spot these hateful campaigns for what they are: attempts to discredit and undo the vital work of journalists who report on the most toxic communities on the internet. We are encouraged that our colleagues at The New York Times are standing by Sarah in the face of feigned outrage.
This is a good statement, but I agree more with Libby Watson of Splinter:
The New York Times really fucked this one up. Instead of ignoring this ridiculous complaint and letting it die — which it would have, because who the fuck cares what The Gateway Pundit is doing — they have validated it. (At least they didn’t fire her, you might say, but even responding to this garbage sets a terrible precedent and legitimizes a completely illegitimate, bad faith campaign to discredit Jeong and the Times itself.)
Now, according to the Times, it is fair to say that being rude about white people serves “to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media,” and that her tweets represent a “type of rhetoric” at all and not just… jokes, nothingnesses, completely mundane and honestly quite boring observations that have no wider importance or meaning. Do we think Sarah Jeong actually enjoys chasing down and bullying old white men for fun? Do we think she earnestly wants to “cancel” white people? No, because that doesn’t mean anything — “cancel” doesn’t mean “do genocide to.”
Fringe trolls only have this kind of power if it is granted to them.
I look forward to reading Jeong’s columns in the Times starting next month.