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Wu was target of a Reddit/4chan harassment campaign: they claimed her white boyfriend actually builds her projects.

Wu told VICE that for the interview, all questions regarding relationship, etc. are off limits.

VICE went ahead and made it a topic. Wu refused to answer. In the article, VICE retold the 4chan claims, making Wu's refusal to answer a new nugget for the 4chaners to claim her guilty.

Jeong offhandedly dismissed Wu's troubles and acted as expert on the issue purely on being of Asian descent, which has nothing to do with living in PRC.

Jeong, who is unjustly the target of another ridiculous and purely vile 4chan harassment campaign, decided to not stand up for Wu, when she was the target. Instead she dismissed her struggle and sided with the white male VICE editor.

> acted as expert on the issue purely on being of Asian descent

Not quite, she wrote that she asked a woman from the PRC (but I think now living in America).

Still, not much better.

>who is unjustly the target of another ridiculous and purely vile 4chan harassment campaign

I'm assuming this is about more than them claiming her boyfriend builds her projects, any insight you can shed ?

The 4chan campaign against Wu was based around claiming she doesn't build her projects herself, driven by racism and sexism. I guess Wu couldn't even be bothered by people being racist and sexist towards here, but claiming she isn't authentic and doesn't have tech-skills awakes her tiger. She's a hacker, her tech-cred is everything.

The campaign against Jeong is some bs about old tweets where she mimicked the racism she gets back, recast as racism against white people.

Wu and all her followers would happily stand with Jeong against this bs (the same racist and sexist garbage Wu has to fight) - if she wouldn't have sided with the attackers when the same thing happened to Wu.

>The campaign against Jeong is some bs about old tweets where she mimicked the racism she gets back, recast as racism against white people.

Having read all of Sarah Jeong’s tweets as they pertain to this controversy, I find it hard to believe that many were intended as satire. She has a clear pattern of unprompted tweets that make sweeping negative generalizations about white people, particularly old white men. I’m white, and I don’t like being singled out and put down on the basis of my skin color. It is alienating, it is dehumanizing, and it provokes an immediate instinctual (and generally unproductive) defensive emotional reaction.

I don’t buy the excuse of, “they started it.” Sarah’s obviously faced tons of online harassment, but since when have two wrongs ever made a right? The Golden Rule doesn’t say, “Treat others as you would like to be treated, except white people.” I would expect better from someone in Sarah’s position.

Having said that, a few racially-bigoted tweets don’t justify a 4chan harassment campaign. I also understand how it becomes difficult to discuss such an issue when an online hate mob is so clearly invested in one side of it.

> I don’t buy the excuse of, “they started it.”

Spot on. Once you start excusing things with "they started it", you're no longer on a slippery slope, you're in free fall (and her tweets make is seem like she's enjoying the ride).

>The campaign against Jeong is some bs about old tweets where she mimicked the racism she gets back, recast as racism against white people.

This I saw just recently, my opinon here differ from yours though, had these been direct responses to racist comments then I would have found the explanation plausible, but they're not, and coupled with the sheer volume of them I can't see them as anything but her racist opinions.

As for 4chan 'campaigns', does this site has any sway whatsoever ? Back when I went there ages ago it seemed like anonymous people was just trying to be edgy and do 'shitposting'. I thought reddit was 'the place' these days ?

I just learned that VICE had her patron taken down and her Youtube channel demonetized due to her doxxing someone at VICE as a direct result of this article (which is not an excuse for doxxing, but something that would not have happened had not VICE ignored their agreement).

There was/is an effort to get Jeong fired from her new job at the New York Times by an online mob best characterised as either the overlap or union of "Gamergate" misogynists and alt-right trolls. This may actually be the reason the article appeared here.

VOX does a better job at summarising than I could: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-t...

I think that hiring someone as an editor who has a long public history of very racist tweets, reflects very poorly on the New York Times.

I am not part of any 'online mob', nor am I misogynist or alt-right.

She has a "long history of very racist tweets" in the same sense that BurningCycles has a long history of writing "I am a misogynist", i. e.: if you wilfully ignore context.

...but the linked article, and the NYT's statement, already said as much in rather easy-to-understand terms. Which makes me suspect that their further explanation of "bad faith" might also be relevant here.

>in the same sense that BurningCycles has a long history of writing "I am a misogynist", i. e.: if you wilfully ignore context.

This argument makes no sense, I have not written misogynist statements at all, let alone a whole twitter feed full of them.

>but the linked article, and the NYT's statement, already said as much in rather easy-to-understand terms.

I found the excuse in the statement unplausible, these were not responses to any hostile tweets, at best they were racist comments made for shits and giggles rather than being her actual views.

> reflects very poorly on the New York Times

The alt-right was on the verge of defusing the "racist" accusation as an effective weapon in the culture wars.

The NYT's Sarah Jeong stunt effortlessly made alt-right types literally crawl over each other to be first to accuse the NYT of "racism", in the process affirming the supreme moral severity of the accusation to themselves.

Very smart play on the part of the NYT.

I'm still trying to figure out where it is y'all are getting that this was primarily a GamerGate-based accusation.

It wasnt a campaign though. They outed her partner based on pictures of his equipment he himself posted online before she hit the scene. He was a talented maker.

I dont think anyone would care had she been transparent.

"I know what Russians are like I can see them from my house" becomes, I know what Chinese are like, my parents are Korean.

Except Palin was laughed at, and Jeong got hired by the NYT.

I don't quite get it either, but at the very least, she talked to Vice before they published the article and said she wanted her relationship status and sexuality to not be discussed, and then Vice put in several paragraphs about her relationship status anyway (from the original Vice article at https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjqdb/naomi-wu-s..., "Wu told me she didn’t want to discuss her marital status, but before publishing the piece, I followed up with her. I hoped to discuss the Reddit conspiracy theory that claimed someone she’s in a relationship with was behind her work.")

If someone says that X is important and to please not do it, and you do X anyway, that's crappy behavior.

edit: found a Twitter thread on Chinese political dynamics. It looks like you can be arrested for simply being a vocal feminist: https://twitter.com/jackiehluo/status/982087205907607552

Yikes.

"so now we're back at the vice article. apart from the sexism/racism, what would have been so bad about rebutting the conspiracy theory that she's the "face" of a white man who's really responsible for everything she does?"

"i can think of a few potential issues that could tip the scales when it comes to safety concerns. for one, rebutting the conspiracy theory and framing it as a feminist issue may require or imply a more overtly political stance on feminism, which we've seen can be dangerous."

> and said she wanted her relationship status and sexuality to not be discussed, and then Vice put in several paragraphs about her relationship status anyway

I was confused by the timeline. My impression is that Vice emailed her wanting to ask about the personal accusations. Wu saw this as breaking the agreement and went public before the article was published. The mention of her relationship in the subsequently published article refers only to this dispute between Wu and Vice, and AFAIK it’s not mentioned elsewhere in the article.

Ahh, hm, according to this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/89br5e/whats_...) you're right.

It still seems like she said, I don't want to discuss X, Vice said, let's discuss X anyway. Even though that happened prior to publishing the piece, the meta-discussion of X shouldn't have made it into the final piece. If someone says a topic is off-limits, and you continue bring it up anyway, that's kinda douchey. I'm not going to defend attacking Vice on Twitter before the article got published, but the final product is definitely still douchey.

> It still seems like she said, I don't want to discuss X, Vice said, let's discuss X anyway. Even though that happened prior to publishing the piece, the meta-discussion of X shouldn't have made it into the final piece.

I don't quite buy that. The subject of an article can dictate the terms of an interview (in this case, what subjects they're willing to discuss), but it's not part of journalistic practice to allow a subject to dictate what goes into the article itself. A journalist who allows themselves to bound that way isn't doing something in principle different than PR for their subjects.

And Koebler never agreed to keep the 4chan/reddit rumors out of the piece. He agreed not to ask Wu about it in their interview, and he broke the spirit of that agreement if not its letter by only bringing the topic up in a subsequent email exchange instead of the interview itself, so he doesn't come out of this looking great. But he wasn't under an obligation to avoid writing about the controversy (which I think is pretty clearly ginned up nonsense) in the final article.

In this case, we're talking about a country where even the phrase #metoo is censored and outspoken feminists end up in jail, so, Vice should've listened to Naomi Wu about what could and could not go into the article.

> but it's not part of journalistic practice to allow a subject to dictate what goes into the article itself.

It should be when such information can have serious repercussions for the subject of the article, and these facts are mentioned and agreed upon before the interview takes place. It's ridiculous to hide behind journalistic standards to justify unethical behavior.

I agree that the behavior is unethical, as I described at greater length here [1]. I'm just trying to bring some analytical clarity about what the fault was.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17697128

If Wu felt that writing about the controversy would damage her standing in China, then he shouldn't have done that. Seems pretty straightforward.

That thread from Jackie was nothing but tying datapoints, worn cliches of the big bad ccp, and conjecture. They have cut SSH before and tracked down 'subversive' elements but can't shut down someone who stands out in any crowd? Doesn't add up. I likely bet they figure she is good PR for Shenzen/China

Wu’s position is complicated. She can’t say clearly what she is contending, because -from what I gather- that would be a sort of confession that Chinese authorities would use against her. The result is that her arguments come out as shallower then they are. I still think that the bullying is clear, tho, regardless of the core issue

The mere existence of Wu is an outlier in China (and possibly in rest of the world). As anyone that closely follows Chinese politics know, the CCP is not keen on outspoken/unique people. Rappers has been banned for rapping about money and women (!); women have been arrested for promoting awareness of sexual harassment. I think Wu is simply trying (and failing) to make herself not more controversial than already is.

> However, if I'm ever in a position where Vice would want to interview me I'd probably turn them down after reading this purely out of caution.

Motherboard and Vice as a whole have in the past published stories that I'm directly or tangentially involved in and gotten the facts completely backwards on multiple occasions. Always in a way that tells a more sensational story.

I wouldn't be involved with that publication -- full stop.

They've even doubled down on the Sugar Weasel story 5 years later, after it being pointed out to them repeatedly that it was factually incorrect.

If you read the Vice article though it's incredibly flattering to Wu. This isn't some hit piece. Yes, it does mention the online conspiracy theories, but it takes a pretty firm stand against them. It's confusing because Wu's reactions to the Vice article just don't seem proportional at all. Maybe there's something that hasn't yet been disclosed about the interview.

This thread [1] sheds some light on why it might not seem like a big deal to us, but would be to someone in China.

[1] https://twitter.com/jackiehluo/status/982087205907607552

The thread is a huge reach; nothing but tying vague data points and using the tired cliche of the big bad chinese govt as a bogeyman.

The CCP will act, like the recent temp SSH ban, when it feels it has to/has gone out of control.

What the government will actually do doesn't matter. If the person giving interview has worries about something, even if it is obvious to everybody else that it is them being overly paranoid, shouldn't it still be the ethical responsibility of journalist to respect their wish? (Unless talking about it is in the public interest.)

I don't think any of this matters. It seems the issue is, whatever was mentioned in the article could and maybe have put her in trouble with local authorities.

She asked them not to mention it, and they still did. Putting her at risk for no good reasons.