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Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

>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.

> 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.

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