So I decided to sum up some issues with the Naomi-Vice shitstorm that I have been seeing circulating around. The main reason I want to bring up this point, is to simply emphasize some basic facts that indeed our principles are not really principles until they are under scrutiny and trialed by fire.
Blame game TL;DR (if you are coming already familiar with the story and want to reproach me for saying things I didn’t say):
- Vice was wrong to violate written agreement, inexcusable
- Patreon wasn’t wrong in their decision
- Naomi is wrong to release personal information, even if wronged
Claims TL;DR:
- C1: Naomi agreed to be interviewed by Vice under a specific agreement.
- C2: Vice violated written agreement about not mentioning parts about Naomi’s life.
- C3: The mention is irrelevant to the article Vice was writing.
- C4: The mention itself harms her reputation, and therefore does harm to Naomi.
- C5: Naomi retaliated by including addresses in one of her videos.
- C6: Vice’s lawyers targeted her Patreon page and eventually took it down.
The interesting part in this scenario is that there does not appear to be any dispute on the truth of these claims. The only dubious one at best is C1, as that is hard to prove, luckily Naomi gives us a bunch of email exchanges.
C2-C3 is easy to check as the article is public, and Naomi had given them access to everything they wanted, and had an explicit agreement about it.
So let’s start this one with Vice was obviously in the wrong here, the author of the article even tried to explain it in their own article (at least at the date of this writing), ignoring some of the key things mentioned, and even not addressing any of the claims Naomi made. So it does appear that Vice is most probably in the wrong here.
Now Naomi, as per her tweets has been trying to press Vice about this issue and seems to have exhausted all means. All but one that is. So she decided to include some personal information in her build video. Now of course this is fundamentally flawed on so many levels which I will explain later, regardless of how desperate she was. At best, it was a naive move.
Vice’s lawyers issue a strongly worded letter to Patreon, the video is taken out and the Patreon page is also taken down. This of courses significantly damages Naomi, as her income for her videos is mainly due to her Patreon. Obviously this is a move that is quite hypocritical of Vice, as they seem to have breached the personal agreement they had with Naomi, related to personal information. So at this point, this is inexcusable.
So up until Naomi dropped that video, I was pretty sympathetic to her reaction. Nobody likes to go through that, and it is quite abhorrent to violate written agreements. But why do I feel the need to write this, I guess to highlight the other fact, that I often see people in such situations and they do not realize that they misplayed their hand, very terribly. Generally one can dismiss this as saying, well Naomi gave them a taste of their own medicine, but sadly two wrongs do not make a right.
So the first issue is that Naomi lashed out at Patreon, which is clearly not in the wrong here. Naomi did in fact release personal information. While Naomi later said that she did not know that, she had effectively tried to smear Patreon before even reading the TOS to verify. She felt bad for not knowing the rules, I guess, but not bad for lashing out on Patreon? Patreon is of course no saint, they could have folded or simply disregarded that, but why would they? She was in the wrong here. Throwing tantrums at it won’t make it any more right.
Naomi either strikes me now as naive, or that she is simply making one bad judgment call after another. Firstly, she does seem very cautious, agreeing to the terms of the interview, assuming that VICE will hold its end. We can chalk this one out to naivety or good faith. But she did indeed take a risk to do this, and the risk was for visibility. The risk was pretty high again according to Naomi.
Particularly in this tweet she strikes me as very naive, yes the media is a behemoth, and you cannot expect it to report accurate stories, generally this is the first intuition one should have when threat modeling. Secondly, assuming that Vice betrayed their written agreement, does anyone think it is strategically the best advice to threaten Vice with releasing personal information? I mean, what did anyone expect them to not play dirty after they have shown they play dirty? How foolish. There is an old saying that if you want revenge dig two graves. Well, if you fail at getting your revenge, then that is going to look very very bad. Generally, one should not play such games with behemoths, unless they know they can. So at this point Naomi knew that Vice wasn’t going to be nice to her, given the article release, and so she decided to burn it all. That’s fair, that’s understandable, but do not complain about things lost in a fire, especially if the enemy has fire extinguishers and you do not .We can chalk it off to being emotional, but then again it does appear that was a desperate move, but one with a high cost.
I think ultimately, this is the point everyone is missing, most of what a person has is integrity. Clearly Naomi did not want the personal information released because it would smear her image, and attack directly her integrity, but by actually publishing private information, she did end up doing the same. On the one hand, she cannot claim to be a victim of having her personal information released while simultaneously releasing other people’s personal information. And on the other hand, she did harm her integrity by releasing other people’s personal information, something Vice wanted to do all along.
I hope that all this story does not discourage Naomi to continue doing what she does best, and is very capable of. And be a small reminder that, it is still wrong to do things we consider wrong, just because someone wronged us, but instead it is a test of how strongly we hold these principles. The cost was Patreon, but integrity is much more valuable, never sacrifice that.
