> And here he is calling the situation "Stasi-like".
He is calling it stasi like because people routinely get blacklisted when this happens to them - they lose their job, their friends, and become unemployable. In fact, blacklisting is the exact point of this behavior!
> They arrested political dissenters by the thousands. Andreesen is a billionaire who would, at worst, have to apologize on twitter and continue his life of total freedom.
These kinds of arguments would crop up in the cancel culture debates, and the same rebuttal applies: that a billionaire is able to survive some particular injustice doesn't lessen the injustice. Notably, the overwhelming majority of people who are cancelled are not famous billionaires (and thus you don't hear about them and there is probably no outcry to right the wrong, although there are exceptions).
To be perfectly clear, he was using it to refer to citizen-surveillance which is patently nefarious.
> Greenwald is ascribing a lot of intent that he can't back up.
Those of us who suffered her social media account while it was public have the context to know that his characterization isn't far off. More importantly though, this isn't about her, but rather about the broader trend of policing ideological transgressions and passing it off as "journalism".
And it's seriously rich of him to accuse another journalist of pursuing an agenda.
> And to my other point, what about Donald Sterling? He had a one-on-one private phone call leaked by his mistress that resulted in him being banned for life from the NBA for expressing his personal opinions. Consider that the apotheosis of "Cancel Culture".
Broken clocks are right twice a day, but that's hardly a reason to prefer them.
She is a NYT reporter - a profession which trades on trust - and clearly uses her Twitter profile as an extension of her profession. She used that platform to make a false accusation regarding a member of an event of little-to-no public interest using details taken entirely out of context. That speaks volumes about her intent. Instead of retracting it, she posted a "clarification" and in the same post continued to grandstand about how the imagined infraction was wrong and talk down to the accused.
A post where she "owned it" would look something like this: "Earlier I said ___. I have since discovered that I was incorrect. What actually happened was ___. I'm sorry for my mistake and I will make an effort to do better going forward." What actually happened was worlds apart.
The original quote was "Stasi-like citizen-surveillance", which is important additional context. It's "Stasi-like" in that he's remarking on an industry of people who are policing the speech of their fellow citizens for ideological transgressions. Of course you can dispute this characterization, but let's be clear about what is actually up for dispute.
Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from the rest of your sentence is not what you intended. I would not have read it this way from the phrase 'A big mistake, but she owned it.'