Wearing thick gold hoops, a dainty necklace, and a white KN95 mask at a White House event for digital influencers in August, The Washington Post’s technology and online culture columnist Taylor Lorenz took a selfie with President Joe Biden standing in the background, superimposed the caption “War Criminal :(” underneath the President’s face, and posted it to her private “Close Friends” list on Instagram.

Not long after, Lorenz’s longtime critic Jon Levine managed to get his hands on the selfie and posted a screenshot of it to X. Almost immediately, Lorenz claimed the selfie was doctored to include a caption that she’d never written (“You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes,” she replied (she has since deleted the reply, but NPR reported on it here), but after NPR was able to verify the authenticity of Levine’s screenshot, her story quickly changed.

“I literally never ‘denied [the caption] was real,’” she said in one X post. In another post, she called the caption an “obvious meme reference.”

Per reporting at NPR, the Post ended up reviewing the incident, which, naturally, was a public embarrassment. Still, it’s hard to feel much for the Post, which allowed her to fail upward by hiring her in the first place — when it hired her in 2022, Lorenz had a documented history of lying, especially about tech, the very beat it brought her on to cover.

Shortly after starting at the New York Times in 2019, Lorenz wrote a piece accusing Arya Toufanian, founder of the startup, I’m Shmacked, of “promis[ing] students Instagram fame, then silenc[ing] them with threats.” Per a libel lawsuit filed against Lorenz and the Times by influencer Ariadna Jacob (about whom Lorenz had written a critical piece in 2020), Kyle Oreffice, one of the sources Lorenz interviewed for the piece on Toufanian, said in a notarized affidavit that Lorenz had “never asked [Orrefice] for any documentary proof showing that Mr. Toufanian defrauded or scammed anyone.”

Per reporting from Paul Thacker, Toufanian spent three years under investigation by the Department of Justice before the charges against him seemed to be abruptly dropped, and was still getting emails from the DoJ around the time Lorenz moved to Post, which proclaimed when she was hired:

Taylor is a trendsetter not just in what she covers but how she covers it. She has become the chief chronicler of TikTok’s march to social media dominance, was responsible for introducing the phrase “OK boomer” to the masses and was one of the first journalists to identify the influence of the conversation app Clubhouse.

That the Post should mention Clubhouse was ironic: after writing a rather glowing profile of the the audio-based real time chat app for the Times in May of 2020, Lorenz turned on Clubhouse when she realized its general commitment to free speech would not afford her special treatment.

It began in June of 2020, when Steph Korey, then co-CEO of Away, a luxury tech luggage company, wrote a long post on her Instagram about the death of journalistic ethics after The Verge published a piece accusing her of creating a “toxic work environment.” “Steph Korey,” Lorenz wrote on X, “the disgraced former CEO of Away luggage company, is ranting on IG stories about the media. Her posts are incoherent and it’s disappointing to see a woman who ran a luggage brand perpetuate falsehoods like this abt an industry she clearly has 0 understanding of.” (She has since deleted the tweet — screenshot below.)

At this point, Balaji Srinivasan stepped into the conversation to correct Lorenz: Korey was, at the time, still CEO of Away. “Every CEO, founder, investor, and engineer in tech sees the vitriolic tweets these employees of media corporations put out,” he wrote on X. “Then they turn around and feign neutrality by writing passive voice articles.” Srinivasan’s criticism of Lorenz’s journalistic practices didn’t end on X; it bled over into Clubhouse, where he and other VCs and tech professionals held a conversation on the state of journalism that eventually turned into a conversation about Lorenz — while Lorenz was listening in.

“I don’t plan on opening the app again… I don’t want to support any network that doesn’t take user safety seriously,” she told Wired in July of 2020.

Her best laid plans didn’t stick much. In January of 2021 — over half a year after swearing off Clubhouse — Lorenz posted an article to Medium titled “Clubhouse Moderation Issues and Incidents,” consisting of screenshots of her own tweets in which she accused various Clubhouse users of bigotry as well as links to other mainstream publications worrying about the app’s refusal to moderate its users’ speech.

The next month, she joined a conversation on the app, during which she alleged that Marc Andreessen, one of the app’s investors, had “​​just openly [used] the r-slur [“retarded”] on Clubhouse tonight.” Predictably, it turned out she’d mistaken his voice for someone else’s — and there was recorded proof. Lorenz was forced to apologize and delete the tweet (none of this stopped her from complaining in May of that year to her former employer, The Atlantic, about how she had been shadowbanned from Clubhouse).

The Andreessen incident wasn’t, of course, her first blatant professional lie. When Lorenz and the Washington Post were under fire in 2022 for stealth-editing an article riddled with inaccuracies — Oculus VR Founder Palmer Luckey pointed out that Lorenz had previously reported Luckey had voluntarily left Facebook when he was in fact fired for his conservative political views.

“What story of mine are you talking about? I don’t cover Oculus and never have,” she tweeted under his thread. He replied back:

“Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has announced that he is leaving the company just three years after selling it to Facebook for $2 billion.”

“BY TAYLOR LORENZ - 03/30/17 5:27 PM ET”

But sure, you don’t cover Oculus and never have.

Lorenz deleted her reply to Luckey.

— Neeraja Deshpande