Jesse SingalVerified account

Freddie quit twitter because he publicly falsely accused someone of rape in order to smear them.

And for anyone reading this who hadn’t heard about that, yes, it was really that heinous.

I actually disagree with this. I think the lesson is we should all wait for the facts before staking public views on incidents like this. The police are investigating; we did not all need to announce a theory of the case right away.

Public skepticism, like public confidence, was guessing. Why guess?

why would expressing your speculative skepticism at that point have been wiser than others expressing their speculative support?

No. You were a left-of-center person who was responsible, and kept his concerns to backchannel convos until the people whose job it was to figure this shit out had done their job. Twitter-poison is making us think that patience is somehow not a part of good journalism.

I lurch back and forth on this, and I'm feeling more certain than ever that silence until the facts have been settled by people with access to those facts is never a bad course of action.

I stopped ‘immediately reacting’ to stories and/or breaking news years ago. Now I read and wait, collect more data, read everything again, think about it quite a bit, THEN react publicly. Maybe. I got burned once about 6 yrs ago b/c I didn’t wait for enough info. Never again

I took a person’s word on a story because I trusted them, and shit... that was a huge mistake I’ll never repeat. And so I don’t want to ever put my followers in that situation either (I get something wrong, but they unquestionably believe it b/c they trust me as a source)