Thread by @WillMcAvoyACN

So, as you might imagine, I have quite a bit to say about @BretStephensNYT's column today which, for lack of better words, is just awful. There's a lot--A LOT--in the column that is extremely misguided, so this is going to be a rather long thread and for that I apologize.

Early in the piece, @BretStephensNYT compares himself to Justine Sacco, which is laughable for a couple reasons. First, Sacco was not a public figure. Her tweets were seen by 123 people. Stephens writes a column in the New York Times, one of America's most prestigious newspapers.

(Sacco was also lambasted for a single tweet, not a column in a major newspaper. Sacco would later tell a reporter [at Stephens' newspaper] "I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” nytimes.com/2015/02/15/mag…)

And so @BretStephensNYT, rather than show introspection about his column and consider the criticism he received, used a woman who sent an ill-advised tweet and use that as a shield to protect himself, a man with a column in America's most prestigious newspaper, from criticism.

In his column @BretStephensNYT also goes to great lengths to suggest that twitter criticism or dog-piling is a liberal phenomenon. He doesn't outright say it, but he cites exclusively cases where progressives have bullied people with whom he agrees with politically.

He doesn't, for example, mention the woman who made a habit of posing next to signs doing the opposite of what the sign said. She made a (dumb) mistake of pretending to scream and flip the bird next to a sign asking for silence at respect at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The outrage for that event was primarily from the right, yet @BretStephensNYT ignores it. He does however, mention an author who took a photo of a Metro employee eating and tweeted it to the world. Stephens thinks the author was a victim, perhaps not recognizing the irony.

He also doesn't bring up 'dongle-gate', an incident where one man made a joke about dongles, got his picture taken by a woman who was offended by the comment, and then both became subjects of competing internet bullying, with the woman who took the photo getting the brunt of it.

I assume because, well, it doesn't fit his narrative.

@BretStephensNYT also doesn't bring up the 11 trans women of color killed in the US in 2019 alone this year. He doesn't mention that 85% of school-age LGBT students report being verbally harassed in their schools.

He doesn't mention that 28% of LGBT youth have reported that they have been the victim of cyber-bulling. @BretStephensNYT takes time to talk about college professors, but he doesn't drop a single word for Ryan Halligan or Megan Meier or the other teenage victims of cyberbulling.

Of course @BretStephensNYT is going to bring up the Betsy Ross bullshit in the same column, again having no sense of irony as he uses a bullshit story from the right-wing outrage machine as an example of the left's bullying, but who the left's victim was here. Betsy Ross?

This is not to say that liberal dog-piling is not a problem. It is. That should be clear when last night twitter was abuzz about an account that was allegedly a racist teenage girl upset about the casting of a black woman in The Little Mermaid live action reboot.

(Of course, the account was a troll account, there was no racist girl, she was an invention, but the depth and volume of the left-wing outrage machine was in full force there, and like Sacco the target was an account with a relatively small following. But it's still concerning.)

The same phenomenon that led half of twitter to dump on a random troll account led to the conservative outrage over a shoe that they didn't even know existed three days ago. A more self-aware columnist than @BretStephensNYT would have seen this and not used it as an example. Alas

Finally, a minor quibble: @BretStephensNYT favorably compares the American Revolution to the French Revolution in his quest against public shaming. He ignores that public shaming was legal in the US in 1776, a fact that is documented in one of the articles cited in his column.

There is a difference between shaming, bullying and criticism, @BretStephensNYT. There are serious problems with all three on the internet, but you are not even in the top 10,000 examples of quality victims, Bret, and perhaps you should take some time for introspection.

Anyway, I don't have a column in the New York Times, and letters to the editor are restricted by length--which basically allows columnists to do the Ted Cruz thing where they accuse you of 15 things and when you only have time to answer for 12, they focus on the remaining three.

My point here is not to bury @BretStephensNYT, but rather hope that he will some day realize that he has been blessed with a publication of considerable reach, and hope he will have self-awareness in the future before making himself the victim whenever someone is critical of him.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.