Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz doubled down on publishing the identity of the Libs of TikTok owner in an interview released Sunday with CNN’s Brian Stelter.
Lorenz told Stelter that the political right criticized her Tuesday article titled, “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine,” because they “don’t want scrutiny” for allegedly targeting LGBTQ people.
“Powerful people do not want scrutiny, they want to be able to discredit the media so they can operate with impunity,” she said. “Case in point, this woman deleted thousands of tweets the day that my article came out because she realized that she was going to be under increased scrutiny and that people were really going to start looking at her account. I think that’s a good thing. I think we should scrutinize anyone who has power in this country, anyone that’s influencing politics and legislation and public sentiment in the media.”
The article exposed the identity of the owner, Chaya Raichik, and initially linked her real estate page that included her home address. The columnist said the term “doxxing” has become a “buzzword” in conservative media and denied revealing any personal information.
“We absolutely did not reveal any personal information about this woman at all, remotely,” she claimed. “I know that sometimes reporting practices can seem foreign to people that aren’t familiar with journalism, but this was very by the book and very benign. The thing is, the right-wing media will lie, right? They kind of will just spin up these narratives, the goal is to sow doubt and discredit journalism and that is their agenda.” (RELATED: ‘Sociopathic’: DeSantis Spokeswoman Torches Washington Post And Taylor Lorenz)
Lorenz insinuated that the criticisms are “bad faith attacks” and must be recognized by journalists and the American people. Stelter suggested the conflict is “cherry-picking” and arose from “toxicity,” questioning how the media can break this cycle.
“I think we need to look to reputable news organizations that are not driven by outrage,” Lorenz said. “I think, when you think about the future of media, a lot of it is moving towards these accounts and accounts that are driven for social media attention. Whether it’s a YouTube account, or an Instagram, or a TikTok or Twitter.”
“And I think we need to take a step back and make sure we know who we’re getting our news from, make sure that things are framed correctly and not just buy into things that feed into the point of views that we already have.”
The owner of Libs of TikTok appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the first time on April 14 after Twitter suspended the account for “hateful conduct.” The owner said she chose to remain anonymous due to receiving death threats and hate mail.
Lorenz’s article came after she sobbed during an April 1 MSNBC interview over the “severe PTSD” she said she suffers from mean tweets directed at her.
“They’ll threaten children, they’ll threaten my parents,” Lorenz said. “I’ve had to remove every single social tie, I have severe PTSD from this. I’ve contemplated suicide, it got really bad. You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life and it’s so isolating.”