LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, MEDIA EDITION: The ‘Sh*tty Men in Media’ List Has Officially Been Weaponized.

The “shitty media men” list wasn’t made to be a bludgeon. When the anonymous, crowdsourced Google spreadsheet was first created earlier this month to collect anonymous reports of alleged sexual abusers, harassers, and general creeps in the New York City media and publishing sphere, it was presented, and understood by its creators, more as a shield than as a weapon — a tool to help women to protect themselves from men they should avoid. It was highly and admittedly unreliable — “take everything with a grain of salt,” it said at the top, and “if you see a man you’re friends with, don’t freak out” — but it was also private, meant to be shared quietly and directly between women the way whispered warnings always have been.

This model, of course, didn’t work for very long. For about 24 hours, the list circulated as it was intended to, among a fairly small number of women. Then it was taken offline, though screenshots, and a re-created read-only version floated around the internet in the days that followed. That iteration of the list was also taken offline; now, an Excel spreadsheet that appears to be a reproduction of the original Google document is floating around the web. This time, though, the list is no longer even theoretically a tool for helping women. It’s now being leaked and distributed not to protect women from predators but to publicly attack the men on it. The list has been weaponized for the online culture wars, and the women who created it, contributed to it, and were intended as its readers left totally powerless and voiceless as it’s used to undermine the industry in which they work.

You’d think that savvy media women would have foreseen this likelihood.