Gizmodo, Cronyism and Narrative Building: A Case Study of Modern ‘Journalism’
On Friday 3rd December 2021 Gizmodo published an article about Twitter’s new rule for posting personal media without consent. The article claims the new rule is being weaponized by fascists who can now get Antifa accounts locked for doxing people. Gizmodo further pointed to this perceived policy abuse to claim that Luke O’Brien, a former journalist and current research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Centre, was the victim of this abuse of Twitter’s report system, but three months earlier.
The very fact that Gizmodo is going to bat for Antifa would seem to support my 2019 research that many blue tick journalists on Twitter have concerning links to Antifa and should be recognised less as journalists and more as activists. Still, the other part of this story — the seemingly unfair suspension of an extremism researcher — is important stuff not least because this Gizmodo article has supporting quotes from the SPLC and the Harvard Shorenstein Centre — heavy hitters in the extremism landscape. These are the people who we rely upon to be precise in their words and factual in their reporting. So when they stand up for a journalist who they say has been mistreated, we should listen intently.
The article states that Luke O’Brien was locked out of his Twitter account in September. It was the 10th of September to be precise. I know because it was I who filed the reports on the tweets he was asked to remove from his account. When asked for comment O’Brien told Gizmodo that he was locked out for ‘one tweet referring to Eoin Lenihan’ which innocently ‘referenced Lenihan’s residency in Germany’. The second tweet was even more egregious! It was a simple response to Claire Lehmann that said ‘Okay, Claire.’ O’Brien even provided screengrabs of the rules violations as proof of this stunning personal violation. Why would Twitter do this to this poor man?
A distraught O’Brien told Gizmodo ‘I posted public information that was already public. It’s very strange, right?…obviously I didn’t post any private media or media or anything.’ He called being locked for the second tweet about Quillette founder Claire Lehmann ‘patently absurd’. Upon the release of this story Hannah Gais of the SPLC was quick to call out the injustice on Twitter and stalk my personal LinkedIn page and post it on Twitter — totally not to encourage anyone to harass me — and it proved that O’Brien was correct, I do in fact live in Germany and I do state that openly in my social media outlets. Case closed.
But wait, case not closed. Somehow after Gizmodo emailed Twitter demanding answers about poor Luke O’Brien’s account and even after an SPLC-led Twitter candlelit vigil, O’Brien remained locked. How could it be?
Well it’s because Luke O’Brien lied and has lots of friends who chip in to sell the lies. O’Brien was not locked out of his account for stating my physical location in a Tweet, nor did he simply say ‘okay, Claire’. Nor were the two tweets unrelated. Since I published my research on Antifa and journalists in 2019 in Claire Lehmann’s Quillette, Luke O’Brien, who was one of those journalists, has waged an unhinged social media harassment campaign against Lehmann and I. I believe Lehmann has him blocked and does not respond to him and I was banned from Twitter directly after the publication of my article after a mass reporting campaign — an actual gaming of the system — by O’Brien, other Antifa-connected journalists and Antifa members. I am not on Twitter therefore I cannot respond — nor would I — and yet, since 2019 he has posted two dozen tweets about me, some of which are vile. In this tweet from March 2020, he comments on a beautiful photo of Claire Lehmann who seems to be on holiday on the beach, ‘Is that Dr. ProgDad Lenihan’s bloated corpse floating in the distance?’
It is vile harassment and it is the act of an angry and extreme man but it is also a calculated act. O’Brien is furious that his cozy relationship with Antifa was uncovered by my research in 2019. He is also furious with Claire Lehmann for publishing it. And this is where the two tweets he was locked for intersect. O’Brien did not simply say ‘okay, Claire’. Lehmann had tweeted ‘If you don’t say what you think is true, stand up for yourself when you’ve done nothing wrong, & have no idea what your values are & how to defend them, well, you can look forward to standing in front of the mirror for the rest of your life & not liking what you see. Good luck.’ It was an innocent and run of the mill tweet about personal integrity that targeted nobody. Nothing controversial. O’Brien responded with ‘Okay, Claire’ and a photograph of me from a comedy skit I did in 2017 that, out of context, makes me look disgusting, silly and in no way a professional researcher.
O’Brien lied when he told Gizmodo he just said ‘okay, Claire’. He also included a photo of me (which I have blurred out in red below) that was designed to humiliate me and embarrass Lehmann. It was very calculated. O’Brien wanted to drive a wedge between Lehmann and I. He wanted her to feel embarrassed to be associated with the man in the photo even though the man in the photo is an obvious comedic persona. He did this for a period of over two years. When Lehmann would post something personal, unrelated to politics he would hijack her thread with these images and comments in an attempt to humiliate me and destroy my reputation as a researcher and to embarrass her and grind her down into disassociating with me. It is massively abusive. It is worse because O’Brien intentionally chose to intrude on Tweets that were positive, non-political or family spaces with his harassment. And of course it proves the need for Twitter’s new rule. In the rationale for employing the new rules Twitter stated that “The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”
Needless to say, the other post for which O’Brien was locked also included an image designed to humiliate and incite harassment. So no, despite Gizmodo’s best spin-job and Hannah Gais’ best efforts at misinformation on Twitter, O’Brien was not locked for posting my publicly available address. He was locked for posting my publicly available location, an unauthorised image and my profession which is not allowed under German law — and is now (rightly) not allowed under Twitter’s new rules. Further, he posted both my given name and my stage name — i.e. doxing. Again, O’Brien lied. And let’s be clear, he didn’t lie by omission. He lied. To reiterate, he said to Gizmodo ‘I didn’t post any private media or media or anything.’
So have Gizmodo been duped by O’Brien? No. The author of the article is Tom McKay. McKay is the fiancé of Hannah Gais — the SPLC researcher dutifully manning the ‘Free Luke’ campaign on Twitter. Hannah was hired last year by — and is the protege of — Michael Hayden who is Luke O’Brien’s closest friend on social media and ever-present accomplice. In this article I speak about how both Hayden — who also appears in my initial Antifa-connected journalists article — and O’Brien together tried to harass my editors and employers after the publication of my Antifa article in a bid to discredit my research and make me unemployable. Hayden is also the guy who gave O’Brien’s ‘dead corpse floating’ tweet its only like. McKay even managed to slip in a reference to a debunked Columbia Journalism Review hitpiece written about me in 2019 to give his claims extra veracity. Its author was Jared Holt. And who is that? Well, that’s the guy they used last time around — in the exact same fashion — to try and discredit me. Oh, he’s also the guy who took the photos of Tom McKay and Hannah Gais’ engagement party.
This Gizmodo article is not the story of a brave, downtrodden journalist who fell prey to loopholes in Twitter’s reporting system and is now being represented by the SPLC, Harvard and the Columbia Journalism Review. This is the story of an intensely angry and obsessive man who stalked a researcher and a magazine owner for two years and called in his friends in the press to pressure Twitter once he got punished for his relentless abuse. This is the state of modern journalism.
