# Taylor Lorenz **Taylor Lorenz** is an American journalist who covers internet culture: influencers, platforms and the people who get famous on them. She reported for Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, [[New York Times]] and [[Washington Post]]. Since October 2024 she has published independently on [[Substack]] as *User Mag* and hosts the *Power User* podcast. Her 2023 book, *Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet* (Simon & Schuster), is a history of the influencer economy. She is on the map because, for about four years, she was one of the reporters the tech right and the online right most often held up as proof that the press was hostile. Her name was the punch line on [[Clubhouse]], the subject of two [[Tucker Carlson]] segments, and the byline that unmasked [[Libs of TikTok]]. There's a paradox in how it ended. A reporter who spent years being attacked by Andreessen Horowitz figures for her coverage of them left legacy media for Substack, a platform whose 2019 and 2021 funding rounds were led by the same Andreessen Horowitz partner, [[Andrew Chen]], who led Clubhouse's. ## Career Lorenz grew up in Connecticut and attended Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She ran social media for the Daily Mail (2011–2014), then reported on technology for Business Insider (2014–2017), The Daily Beast and The Atlantic. Fortune put her on its 40 Under 40 list in 2020. She covered technology for The New York Times from 2019 until March 2022, when she moved to The Washington Post as a columnist. ## The investors' room (2020–2021) Lorenz was an early, heavy user of [[Clubhouse]] and one of the first reporters to cover it. That put her in the middle of the app's fight with the press. - **July 2020.** After a Twitter exchange about the CEO of the luggage startup Away, [[Balaji Srinivasan]] mocked Lorenz online and then joined a Clubhouse room she was in. She left. The room, which included several [[Andreessen Horowitz]] investors, went on to discuss her, with one speaker asking whether she was playing "the woman card." Srinivasan offered Bitcoin prizes for memes about the episode. Vice and Axios reported it as the moment the tech industry's quarrel with its press corps went public. - **February 2021.** In a Clubhouse room where [[Marc Andreessen]] and [[Ben Horowitz]] were discussing the GameStop trading frenzy, Lorenz tweeted that Andreessen had used a slur. Another speaker had said it. She deleted the tweet and apologized. Critics including [[Glenn Greenwald]] used the error to cast reporters on Clubhouse as eavesdroppers. Andreessen had already blocked most tech reporters, which kept them out of rooms where he spoke. ## Tucker Carlson (March 2021) On March 9, 2021, Lorenz tweeted for International Women's Day that the harassment and smear campaign she'd faced over the previous year had "destroyed my life." That night [[Tucker Carlson]] opened his Fox News show by mocking her as someone who should be grateful for her "remarkable good luck," and he came back to her the next night. The New York Times issued a rare statement calling his segment a "calculated and cruel tactic" to unleash harassment. A later study by NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women's Media Foundation, published by Brookings, found that hostile and violent messages directed at her spiked after Carlson's and [[Glenn Greenwald]]'s attacks. ## Libs of TikTok (April 2022) On April 19, 2022, Lorenz's Washington Post article "Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right's outrage machine" identified the anonymous account's operator as [[Chaya Raichik]], a Brooklyn real estate salesperson. The right called it [[Doxxing]]. [[Ben Shapiro]], [[Christopher Rufo]] and others attacked Lorenz, and the Post's senior managing editor, Cameron Barr, defended the story as meeting the paper's standards. The account gained followers sharply in the days that followed, and Raichik became a public figure in her own right. Lorenz later interviewed her. ## Leaving legacy media (2024) In August 2024 a private Instagram story Lorenz posted from a White House event, a selfie with President Biden in the background captioned "war criminal," was screenshotted and posted on X by a New York Post reporter. The Washington Post opened an internal review. She published nothing more for the paper. On October 1, 2024, she announced she was leaving to launch *User Mag* on Substack, saying the kind of internet reporting she wanted to do had become hard to do in corporate media. The Post said she resigned. She had launched *Power User* with Vox Media that February. ## Why it's on the map - **The designated antagonist.** The tech right's case that the press is hostile, and that tech leaders should "go direct," needed a face. From the 2020 Clubhouse room to the Carlson segments, Lorenz was a recurring choice. See [[Social Audio]] and [[Clubhouse]]. - **Harassment as a tool.** Her case is one of the best-studied examples of a large-audience host naming a reporter and an online pile-on following, the pattern Brookings measured. - **A target in private, too.** Semafor's 2025 report on the [[Tech Right Group Chats]] said the chats had produced a "particularly focused and developed dislike" of Lorenz. - **The Libs of TikTok paradox.** Unmasking Raichik didn't diminish her; it gave her a bigger platform. See [[Libs of TikTok]]. - **Exit to the same platform.** Like many reporters she ended up independent on [[Substack]], a platform funded by the same investors the tech-right press critique came from. See [[Andrew Chen]]. ## Connections - [[Clubhouse]] · [[Social Audio]] · [[Balaji Srinivasan]] · [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[Tucker Carlson]] · [[Glenn Greenwald]] - [[Libs of TikTok]] · [[Chaya Raichik]] · [[Doxxing]] - [[New York Times]] · [[Washington Post]] · [[Substack]] · [[Andrew Chen]]