Do we like Taylor Lorenz?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in her own words, but the Post blow-up and a muddy political direction keep her below the top.
Taylor Lorenz is the journalist who made internet culture a serious beat. By her own telling, Tumblr, found in 2009 while she was “working a really garbage temp job”, “changed my life”. She went on to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic and the New York Times business desk, and then the Washington Post, and her book Extremely Online landed in October 2023.
The big blow-up was August 2024. Lorenz shared a selfie from a White House event with President Biden behind her, captioned “war criminal”. She first said someone else added the caption, then told editors she'd shared it. Three people at the Post told NPR she lost newsroom leadership's trust over the post and over misleading them about it. She said it was a joke echoing a meme, and left in October to start User Mag on Substack, saying legacy media was “not the right environment for me”.
On the harm check, her best-known moment is the February 2024 interview with the Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik. She asked whether Raichik knew any LGBTQ people growing up, and told her that many LGBTQ people say the posts cause an enormous amount of pain. The Advocate says the interview drew wide mockery of Raichik. That's a journalist pressing someone who posts about LGBTQ people, not the other way round.
Her name also gets dragged into things she didn't do. In April 2026 a viral post claimed she'd urged someone to “do it” about killing Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Lead Stories rated that false: the image came from a 2025 video of hers reporting on the meme, where she said she wouldn't weigh in on whether it was moral or legal.
The legal trail is thin. Talent agent Ariadna Jacob alleged in a 2021 libel suit that a 2020 Times article by Lorenz defamed her. In September 2022 a Manhattan federal judge dismissed it, finding many statements substantially true and others hyperbole. Jacob was allowed to amend. Search results suggested the case carried on afterwards, but we couldn't confirm how it ended.
Lately the politics have turned murky. She told the Free Press she hasn't changed what she believes, but she's disillusioned and says “There's not a clear political group I map onto now.” An UnHerd columnist wrote that she called the First Amendment a thing worth defending and praised America. Nothing we found there is harmful. Her left-leaning audience is cross about it, which is a mood, not a harm.