"Shortly after he tweeted the news of his own layoff, Nick Wing checked his inbox at HuffPost and saw an email with a few pictures from a troll.
One was an image of President Trump, and another was a Photoshopped meme of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. The edited image shows two bodies hanging from a tree next to the words “Day of the Rope,” a far-right meme about their desire to execute journalists. Underneath Carlson, where the scrolling cable news ticker would usually appear, it reads “JUST KILL THEM. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
Wing was one of many journalists who were let go by Buzzfeed and HuffPost this week and were sent death threats from trolls organizing their efforts on the far-right message board 4chan. Many of those targeted by the harassment campaign did not cover the far-right, including Wing, whose beat focused on inequality and guns.
“It really is upsetting to see such outright animus toward the entire journalism profession, to the point where trolls are openly reveling in people’s misfortune or even working to make it worse. But ultimately I think it says more about their character than anything,” Wing told NBC News.
“What sort of sad and pathetic human being do you have to be to do that?”
Tweets sent from trolls to Wing that included everything from threats to racial slurs to images of swastikas remained visible on Twitter hours after they were posted.
Buzzfeed and HuffPost both laid off substantial portions of its newsrooms this week. Buzzfeed said it would cut about 15 percent of its workforce, and layoffs began Friday. HuffPost’s parent company, Verizon, promised to cut 7 percent of workers from its media division, and those layoffs began Thursday."
Talia Lavin, a freelance writer whose primary income was a political column for HuffPost before her editors were laid off this week, found 4chan threads with users bragging about “taunting them with my sock puppet Twitter.”
“I’m gonna burn so many sock (puppet accounts), I can not help, but gloat to the max,” one user wrote. Another user implored others to “hammer these [expletive] hard and tell them to learn to code.”
Lavin was inundated with sexist and anti-semitic slurs, including one calling her “oven-ready,”
