The Alt Right was devastated by this response. Absolutely devastated.
The New York Times does not bother to hear from the Alt Right on this story.
New York Times: The internet is full of bad people. This is not breaking news.
But in the past week, the anti-Semitic corners of social media have received increased attention because of sustained harassment campaigns against journalists and other public figures and a highly visible effort to combat them by Twitter users.
Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington editor at The New York Times, created a stir when he said Wednesday he would quit Twitter, where he had almost 35,000 followers. He was fatigued by a month’s worth of anti-Semitic messages and photos sent his way, an experience he wrote about in May.
Mr. Weisman said Thursday that he had left Twitter because he was frustrated that it allowed people to spew their hate anonymously and that jousting with the bigots had taken up too much of his time.
“But I did feel like it should be brought to the public consciousness,” he said. “People should know this kind of hate is out there.”
Mr. Weisman said Twitter suspended about 30 accounts shortly after he tweeted that he would be leaving.
The anti-Semitic strain of trolls gained renewed attention after Mic, a news site, reported last week that neo-Nazis were using parentheses as a way to target social media users for harassment campaigns. When they suspected that a Twitter user was Jewish, they put parentheses around the target’s name, essentially inviting other anti-Semites to attack them.
Soon afterward in a countercampaign, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, added the parentheses to his own name. That inspired Yair Rosenberg, a senior writer for Tablet Magazine, to suggest others do the same.
Now, a wide swath of Twitter users, both Jews and gentiles, has also adopted the parentheses, hoping to spread awareness of the issue and make it more difficult to target individuals. In an interview, Mr. Rosenberg said it would also allow more people to see the parentheses and ask what they’re all about, turning anyone into a potential educator on anti-Semitism.
He said the typical cycle of exposing bigotry — someone says a dumb thing, the target retweets it, other people get outraged — is a bit of a downer, and typically reaches people who are already aware that bigotry is bad. Instead, he prefers to mock the vile attacks he receives, hoping humor will help him find a wider audience and increase awareness.
“The only thing you can do is mock it, and show these people: ‘You are outside our discourse,’ ” he said.
