Controversial Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz quit the left-leaning paper Tuesday — weeks after she caused an uproar by calling President Biden a “war criminal” on her Instagram account.
Lorenz, who hadn’t published anything for the Jeff Bezos-owned broadsheet since Aug. 7, said she was leaving in order to launch her own newsletter on the Substack platform, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Her newsletter, titled “User Magazine,” will “cover technology from the user side,” she told the outlet.
“It’s about who has power on the internet and how that power is being wielded,” she said.
Lorenz — who has been at the center of controversy during a tumultuous career that included stints at the New York Times and the Daily Beast — said she “just wanted to get out of legacy media.”
“I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet within these kind of older institutions as a primary job,” she told THR.
The Washington Post said it had launched an investigation into Lorenz after New York Post reporter Jon Levine published on his X account an eyebrow-raising Instagram photo that she uploaded while attending a White House event featuring Biden.
Lorenz took the selfie photo with Biden in the background and the caption “War criminal” written underneath his image.
She shared the photo with a select circle of friends on Instagram, where she has a total of 143,000 followers.
Lorenz claimed that the photo, which was not meant for public consumption, was digitally altered, writing: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”
She told her editors at the Washington Post that the photo was a forgery.
But National Public Radio confirmed the authenticity of the photo, corroborating Levine’s X post.
She took down the post an hour after it was circulated to her friends on Instagram.
The Washington Post did not reveal the result of its investigation.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson said: “We are grateful for the work Taylor has produced at The Washington Post. She has resigned to pursue a career in independent journalism, and we wish her the best.”
Lorenz, who joined the paper in 2022, said she’s looking forward to having a “really interactive relationship with my audience.”
“I like to be very vocal online, obviously. And I just think all of that is really hard to do in the roles that are available at these legacy institutions,” she said.
Lorenz said that “legacy institutions … really struggled to cover the internet in any meaningful way.”
“I write about the attention economy, and I write about the content creator industry, and I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want, and engage a little bit more directly with my readers, with the public, when it comes to my work,” she said.
In 2022, Lorenz was widely criticized for revealing the identity of the social media persona “Libs of TikTok.”
Weeks earlier, Lorenz appeared on MSNBC and broke down in tears while recalling how she faced “harassment” from critics online.
During her stint as a tech reporter for the Times, she was sued by a businesswoman who claimed that she was defamed by a claim that she leaked nude images of one of her clients.
Lorenz also came under fire for accusing tech mogul Marc Andreessen of using a derogatory term during a private conversation on the Clubhouse app. The accusation proved to be false.
