Goodbye to All That Harassment

About the Project

Five years after kicking off a now largely forgotten media firestorm over old tweets about white people, former New York Times editorial board writer Sarah Jeong reflects on what it was that made Twitter a notorious conduit of online harassment. Both a moving first-person account of her own petrifying experience with the right wing and a sobering look at the platform’s supposedly progressive values, Jeong finds that the things that made it a source of pain for many are the same things that made it play such a visible part in Arab Spring, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. The essay is surprisingly funny and poignant as it weaves its way through panic attacks and bomb threats, sketching a picture of the writer herself through a narrative about a life as lived on Twitter.

Written with clarity and restraint, Jeong wrestles with how the platform launched the careers of many journalists, but also warped the entire media industry at the same time. Jeong turns a series of terrifying personal events into an analysis of a platform’s technical features — and how those same features shape interactions, relationships, and history itself. Getting turned into a regular Fox News bogeyman is not exactly a universal experience, but the essay resonated for a great number of readers. After all, we’re all living in a future where we must all have our fifteen minutes of cancellation.