In her short time at the newspaper, Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz has gone after the popular “Libs of TikTok” (LoTT) Twitter account in (by my count) three separate stories, with perhaps the most infamous one being the one where Lorenz doxxed LoTT back in April in part by knocking on the doors of family members in an effort to get more information she thought she could use to smear and shut down the person behind the account, Chaya Raichik.
The other two were in September, first in a piece from earlier this month alleging that the LoTT Twitter account was being “blamed for [the] harassment of children’s hospitals” after the hospitals claimed they’d received harassing phone calls and threats after video tweets she posted over the summer which detailed the type of disturbing “care” kids and teenagers who purportedly claim to be transgender allegedly receive at such facilities.
The byline on that piece included Lorenz, and fellow WaPo reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison. As it turns out, Dwoskin returned alongside colleague Jeremy Merrill for another hit piece earlier this week on right-leaning social media influencers including Raichik. While Lorenz was not listed as one of the authors of that story, she was listed at the bottom as a “contributor” and did play a role in some of the information that was shared in the story, including a claim that some of LoTT’s tweets on Boston Children’s Hospital “led to … a bomb [that] threat caused the hospital to be evacuated.”
Here’s what their original report looked like (emphasis mine):
Meanwhile, several among the 77 have retweeted Chaya Raichik to their large audiences, helping fuel the meteoric rise of her Twitter account, Libs of TikTok. The account, which soared from fewer than 1,000 followers in early 2021 to 1.3 million today, criticizes teachers, medical providers and others who serve transgender children and teens. It was recently suspended after a post led to death threats against providers at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a bomb threat caused the hospital to be evacuated.
The problem with that last part, however, is that the hospital in fact was not evacuated, as Raichik pointed out to Dwoskin in a direct message on Twitter. Incredibly, though Dwoskin acknowledged the error and noted it would be corrected on the website, she actually blamed Raichik for not correcting Lorenz, who was the one who earlier had reached out to Raichik to ask her for comment on the story prior to publication and who had “mistakenly” (according to Dwoskin) included the “evacuated” language in her message to Raichik.
Raichik shared a screengrab of the exchange with Dwoskin to her Twitter account (click on the image below in the first tweet to see the full exchange), also noting in follow-up tweets how this was “Yet another @washingtonpost piece that Taylor Lorenz contributed to that now requires a correction…” and how the paper updated their story to note that the hospital had gone on lockdown with access restricted in response to the alleged threat but had not been evacuated:
Afterward, the question about why the WaPo would keep Lorenz on staff was raised:
One can only conclude from the Washington Post‘s pathetic defenses and continued support of Lorenz including allowing her to continually lie about and misreport on Libs of TikTok (whether on the WaPo website or on her Twitter feed) that they’re perfectly okay with Lorenz continuing to embarrass the paper provided she keeps Libs of TikTok’s Twitter activities on the radars of Very Online Leftists and deliberately misframing those activities in such a way as to suggest LoTT is a dangerous threat to civilized society or something.
In reality, LoTT is a very potent ideological threat to wokeness—woke educators and woke medical professionals, to be exact, which is precisely why left-wing journos like Lorenz and the hacks at Media Matters so often go after the account and those like it. Conservative influencers who can’t be controlled nor scared into silence must be canceled, in their view, because they dare to express WrongThink.
So far, the attacks on the LoTT account are only fueling Raichik’s desire to keep exposing radical leftists in the public and private education systems and in the medical profession all the more. That is good news for fans of her Twitter account, and bad news for those who seek to intimidate her into silence.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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