Remember Taylor Lorenz?

She was the ethics-challenged Washington Post reporter who doxxed the owner of the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter, even going so far as to make a trip to the woman's relatives' doorway, and then apparently lied to her editor about her efforts to reach sources in one of her published pieces.  It was baffling to a lot of us in the trade why she wasn't fired for that one.  Nobody lies to an editor and gets away with it, nor should he.  But somehow the forty-something "internet culture" youthquake reporter sensation was special.

Turns out she was "special" to a lot of establishment leftists, including those on the Mount Olympus of Twitter.  And that became obvious when Elon Musk bought Twitter and then started reinstating banned accounts (Lorenz shrieked, of course, saying it would "open the gates of hell") — and then opened the Twitter files to reporters to have a look at what had been going on.

According to Paul D. Thacker, who wrote the latest Twitter Files addition:

The month before Lorenz's article alleging that Musk was "opening the gates of hell", she successfully pushed to ban a Twitter account with a small following called @fearthefloof. This account dug into her past and detailed her life as a Manhattan rich girl, who attended a Swiss boarding school, and has a well-connected sister named Brook Lorenz — a publicist who has worked at CNN, the Washington Post and CBS News.

According to this now deactivated account, Lorenz is also able to scrub much of her past from web searches because her uncle owns the internet archive, which stores old webpages.

That wasn't the only account she got banned.  She also banned Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the distinguished professor of medicine at Stanford University, for publishing the crank email one of her '"journalist" pals had sent to him.  And there were others.  She also somehow had the power to get a banned account of a pal, Jackson Weimer, restored on the site.  She was quite the "ban" queen over there.

In the case of small fry @fearthefloof and others, Twitter's execs saw no reason to get the accounts banned based on the company's own rules, but weirdly, they were overruled, and Taylor's will stood.

Said one: "We need to be careful with her."

This suggests she had some kind of power inside that company, possibly because of her ties to activists who repeated her talking points, the report noted, and explains why she got so hysterical when Elon Musk came onboard and shut the whole gig down.

Why a Washington Post reporter or columnist should have either the interest or the power to play her high-school games on banning others on social media really is weird stuff.  But here we are.

The thing that leaps out here is that Lorenz is just the latest leftist outsider calling the shots at Twitter.  There were others.  The State Department had a snoot in.  State governments certainly were able to send their requests on whom to ban in.  The various "disinformation" NGOs had their routes in.  The FBI cast itself as "the belly button" of all federal agency interference at Twitter, offering suggestions about which newspapers to ban, such as the New York Post for its Hunter Biden laptop exposé ahead of election time.  The DNC had its fingers in, too.  They all issued their requests and orders to Twitter and the company served as a sort of clearing house for whatever it was that they wanted.  Imagine having to work at that company with that many bosses?  That "we need to be careful with her" pretty well said it all.

Had Elon Musk not bought that company and hosed it out, we never would have learned any of this hideous information about how federal government, state government, activists, NGOs, political groups — and, sure enough, Taylor Lorenz were really calling the shots at that company.

Taylor Lorenz leaps out because of her histrionics.  But there may have been more of them.  How many more were there?  And how many more are still there, pulling the puppet strings, with nobody reporting on them?

Image: Twitter screen shot.