Bizarre Behavior at the Post

A tale of narcissism, victimhood and too much twitter

A few days ago, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel retweeted the above joke. It is a sexist joke - it is kind of weird he retweeted it, as its the sort of thing someone who is 22 would find funny. But alas, it was a joke and he retweeted. Thus begin the troubles.

His colleague, Felicia Sonmez, didn’t like the joke and made a sarcastic remark about how great it is to work somewhere where such a retweet is “allowed.” It is a bit odd because it is Weigel’s personal twitter account, not an internal communication at the Washington Post. In essence she seems to be calling for her work to police the retweets of employees’ private social media accounts. Well, the Washington Post chastised Weigel, he took the post down and apologized, and that was that.

Except not. It is hard to follow the exact details of this but Sonmez started to engage in one of those common cycles where someone of notoriety (Sonmez) does something annoying on twitter (effectively reports her colleague to HR) , gets mean tweets from people in response, then proclaims herself the victim - kind of an echo of what happened to Matt Yglesias at Vox.

Sonmez continued complaining about Weigel, and about her employer the Washington Post (who she is also suing for other reasons.) One of her other colleagues, Jose del Real, asked her to be kinder to her co-workers online and not drag everything onto twitter. So she attacked him pretty hard until he finally blocked her. Then she complained about him blocking her.

Then for several days she kept tweeting about this whole ordeal. She spent a lot of time going through mean tweets and retweeting those, really showing how she is the real victim in all this. She also spent a lot of time finding tweets of people supporting her, retweeting them or taking screenshots of them then posting them herself. Literally her whole twitter feed for days on end is dedicated to this, mixed in with attacks on the Washington Post and her colleagues.

This culminated in Dave Weigel getting suspended for a month, without pay. Around that time, the Washington Post put out a memo asking its employees to be nicer to one another online (which Sonmez attacked and I think viewed as sexist). This was followed by almost all public facing Washington Post employees putting out the same variation of a tweet that was something like “No institution is perfect, but I am proud to work at the Washington Post” (as if they were all emailed a suggested tweet and asked to modify it then post.) Sonmez attacked this too.

This is all very sad but I think its important in this day in age that we cut to the chase and call this all what it is: a very ridiculous spectacle centered around Sonmez.

I don’t doubt she is getting a lot of nasty tweets directed at her, and that is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that nasty tweets directed against women commonly include sexist slurs or references to gender-based violence. It is extremely common and something I think all prominent females encounter on Twitter. You shouldn’t have to go through that.

But you also aren’t a special victim for getting those mean tweets. For one thing, you could choose not to read them, let alone go through an obsessively catalogue them like Sonmez. You could also go off Twitter, instead of spending most of your day on it. I have no idea if Sonmez is a good reporter but she sure seems like a shitty colleague. Her disgust at Weigel’s tweet is justified - I am not sure her choosing to air her grievance online was. But it certainly did not need to devolve into this. Her whole twitter feed for days on end is her going on angry tirades, accusing everyone of being sexist, showcasing very-real sexist tweets against her from random nobodies that she found in her comments, then also showcasing a lot of other tweets from random people saying what a hero she is. And also more attacks on Weigel and del Real.

To psycho-analyze for a moment, I’ll give Sonmez the benefit of the doubt and assume she is in real pain and was somehow triggered by the retweet of a joke. I am sure she truly believes she is the victim here and everyone is out to get her (and that she is also a hero and is fighting a noble cause.) But the whole thing has caused a big headache for the Post and its reporters. And if I were Sonmez’s friend I would recommend that she just step away from Twitter for a few days.