Twitter’s toxicity

One of the most interesting public figures to have emerged in recent years has been Bari Weiss, the American writer. Earlier this year Ms Weiss published the excellent How to Fight Antisemitism; she has spent most of her career doing just that. Until this week, she was an editor at the New York Times. But on Tuesday, in a blistering resignation letter, she left the paper. ‘Journalist leaves newspaper’ may not seem an unusual or important story but in this case it certainly is. Ms Weiss’s departure was prompted by the toxic culture at the New York Times — a culture in which her analysis and condemnation of antisemitism led to her being labelled by colleagues as “a Nazi and a racist” and “writing about the Jews again”. Deplorable as this is, does it matter to British Jews? Deeply. Because what is happening at the New York Times is a product of the same trends that we can see in our own media and public debate. The most cursory glance at Twitter, for example, shows a level of abuse and antisemitism that would, a few years ago, have been shocking but which is now normal. Twitter is easily dismissed as being unrepresentative. But the moral chaos to which the New York Times has succumbed has been driven by the same mentality as the Twitter mobs. Ms Weiss writes that Twitter has become the New York Times’s “ultimate editor”. The same mentality that drives intolerance of anything which conflicts with ‘woke’ pieties on Twitter is now doing the same in much of the mainstream media. This is the new reality. It is rancid and it is dangerous. And it must be resisted.