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April 20, 2022

The WaPo triggers the Streisand effect for Libs of Tik Tok

By Andrea Widburg

The Washington Post attacked Libs of TikTok (“LOTT”), not because it wants to debate the merits of the leftist-made videos the Twitter account exposes to a wider audience, but because it wants to silence the anonymous woman who runs it. Ironically, in a new form of the Streisand effect, the Washington Post seems to have exposed LOTT’s material to literally hundreds of thousands more people.

The current saga of LOTT can be summed up quickly.

LOTT locates videos that leftists voluntarily place on social media about race, gender, and other forms of wokism and then republishes the same material on the LOTT account. I’ve been following the account for months now, maybe even a year, because it’s a window into the core leftism that underlies the Biden administration, the media, academia, and much of K-12 education across America.

The account started acquiring extra traction when Florida’s Parental Rights Act (aka The Anti-Groomer Bill; aka the “Don’t Say Gay” bill) became a matter of national news. For those trying to make the point that bad things are happening in classrooms, LOTT was a goldmine.

And again, LOTT did not create material, did not fake material, and did not dox people. Instead, what LOTT did was republish material that others had already placed in the public domain. Material like this:

Twitter twice tried to shut down the LOTT account but was forced to walk it back because all it did was rebroadcast videos and photos that were already available—and considered acceptable—on multiple social media forums. And so, Plan B was put into place.

Plan B meant putting Taylor Lorenz on the trail. Lorenz calls herself a journalist but she’s not. She’s an “outer.” That is, she outs people for daring to have political viewpoints different from hers and she’ll punish anyone close to those she seeks to destroy.

Because she disagrees with Pamela Gellar’s politics, Lorenz outed Gellar’s daughters, who had developed their own popular, non-political Instagram accounts. She also went after KellyAnne Conway’s daughter. And speaking of Gellar, some people have noted that Lorenz seems to have a real issue with Jews. (LOTT 's proprietor  is Jewish.)

Lorenz has also made a big deal about the horrors of being doxed, claiming that people have harassed her because she dared to expose them. She can dish it out but she can’t take it. Ultimately, Lorenz is an utterly disreputable excuse for a human being.

And there’s no doubt that Lorenz doxed LOTT, revealing not only her name but also publishing her real estate license, which contains all sorts of identifying information. The WaPo eventually deleted that license...and then lied about it:

I sincerely hope that LOTT sues both Lorenz and the WaPo (along with the individual editors involved) and that she gets Nick Sandmann rich off them. Lorenz is a trust fund kid and the WaPo is Jeff Bezo’s private political playground, so there are some mighty deep pockets there. The public should also deride, shame, and shun Lorenz and the WaPo.

But here’s the biggest punishment of all, and it’s a natural consequence of WaPo’s doxing hit piece: Although the purpose was to silence LOTT, it dramatically increased her reach. I don’t know how many followers LOTT had before she was doxed, but I noted about 630,000 on Tuesday morning after the numbers had already begun accruing. As of now 11:45 P.M Eastern Time on Tuesday, the account is at 800,000 followers and it’s increasing, as best as I can tell, by around 2,000 new followers every ten minutes.

This is the Streisand effect on steroids, a term that refers to Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress a photo of her Malibu property only to draw massive attention to the photo. With LOTT’s expanded audience, the account had better start going back to its core activity, which was showing to the wider world the bizarre, creepy, even dangerous materials leftists freely promote about themselves.

Update from Thomas Lifson:

Tucker Carlson began his show on April 19 with a long segment on Taylor Lorenz and her doxxing of LOTT's proprietor. He revealed that Taylor Lorenz did not do the sleuthing work to uncover the identity, but rather got the information from software developer Travis Brown, whose work is supported by the nonprofit Prototype Fund, which is, in turn, supported by the German government.

Image: Libs of TikTok meme. 

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