New York Times TikTok Reporter Is So Committed To Thought Policing She Makes Up Crimes – The Federalist

New York Times TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz has veered from her usual reporting on the activities of online teenagers to the activities of Silicon Valley tech bros in the hopes of catching them in the act of something problematic, but her latest self-own suggests she should stick to her TikTok beat instead.

In her eagerness to slander venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on Saturday night, Lorenz fired off a tweet falsely claiming he said the word retarded in an online audio chatroom on the social media app Clubhouse, which Andreessen is himself an investor in.

A moderator of the chat and several others pointed out Andreessen never used the reported slur.

Instead of issuing a correction or an apology for the inaccurate reporting fired off to her 210,000 followers, Lorenz doubled down with an insufficient excuse for the slander, deleted the tweets, then took her Twitter account private. Her clarifying tweets also condescendingly shamed everyone to think more carefully about using the r-word without explaining any context of how the word was actually used.

For months, Lorenz has obsessed over Andreessen and conversations on Clubhouse. Last fall, Lorenz alleged that several men on the platform were perpetrating malicious sexual behavior on the app, tweeting that it was rife with sexism and misogyny. She quickly blocked other Clubhouse users who challenged her allegations.

On Feb. 2, she bragged on Twitter about circumventing the apps feature blocking journalists from chatrooms by establishing a burner account.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Lorenz is acting as an online hall monitor, deputized by the New York Times, to tattle on and ultimately silence those who they dislike. Journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them, Greenwald wrote.

Greenwald called out CNNs Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy for similar behavior, but it is Lorenz who has dominated the citizen surveillance beat for years.

In 2018 at the Daily Beast, Lorenz doxed Instagram-famous teenagers for the crime of having parents with conservative political beliefs. The Daily Beast proudly announced it was Lorenzs reporting that got the teens show on Oath canceled.

In 2020, Lorenz lashed out at female entrepreneur Steph Korey for her thoughts on the media. After making factual errors and mischaracterizing Koreys statements, Lorenz played the victim of those calling her out.

When the Times published an op-ed by Sen.Tom Cotton last summer, titled Send in the Troops,Lorenz was one of the outspoken Times employees calling the opinion pages decision one that put black staff in danger.

Time and again, Lorenz shows to be on the side of canceling or shutting down anyone or any speech she dislikes or finds dangerous. She even admitted as much in an interview with Katie Herzog on cancel culture in 2019.

I think the way people use cancel culture is this shorthand way of dismissing whatever accusations are against them, Lorenz told Herzog. My general take on it is that its very toxic but also necessary. We are in the correction phase right now and everyone is indiscriminately calling each other out, and thats because were working to set new standards and norms as a society.

The correction phase is a phrase that comes out of the mouth of a communist dictator or a Gestapo officer, not an American journalist. Lorenz is not committed to the First Amendment or free speech of any kind. Instead, she spends her time trolling social media and online chat rooms looking for fireable offenses, and when she cant find them, she fabricates and falsely attributes instead.

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New York Times TikTok Reporter Is So Committed To Thought Policing She Makes Up Crimes - The Federalist