If you’ve been on Twitter the past few days, you may have seen the call to ban a man named Chuck Johnson from the platform. These calls are not necessarily new—the 26-year-old journalist has been been taken to task in the past for shockingly erroneous reporting—including falsely accusing a New York Times reporter of posing for Playgirl and hyping false accusations of a homicide charge against Mike Brown. But his unapologetically unpleasant journalism style brought on new waves of outrage after he doxxed “Jackie,” the woman at the middle of Rolling Stone‘s rape coverage debacle.
The story is long and convoluted, but the brief version is that Rolling Stone‘s lengthy, incendiary piece on college campus rape centered heavily on the alleged, traumatic experiences of woman who called herself Jackie—a woman Rolling Stone has since disavowed upon finding “discrepancies” in her story. This is where Johnson came in, sending his legion of Twitter followers out to find Jackie’s true identity. After threatening her over Twitter, he finally released what he claims is her personal information (we won’t be linking to any of this information here).
This story seems primed to join a long list of others this year that pit two of the Internet’s noisiest camps—crusaders for victim protection and those leery of the feminist movement—against each other. But in this case, almost everyone seems to agree that Johnson is not doing anyone any favors …
