Last night, at approximately 2AM ET, a former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, accusing Linus Media Group of cultivating a toxic work environment and encouraging a work culture that was detrimental to her health as well as sexual harassment directed at her by Linus Media Group employees.
“I chose to quit my role at LTT because it, and the working environment I was facing, were ruining my mental health,” her statement begins. “My work was called ‘dogshit’ I was called ‘incompetent’. When I would reach out to managers and try to get help with these situations, I would be told to ‘put on my big girl pants’ and be ‘more assertive’.”
Reeve went on to accuse the company of barring her from videos after she reported being “grabbed multiple times in the office” and being told to “calm my tits” and “stop being such a bitch.”
Madisons’ thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741.html
(Content warning: self harm)
You’re not wrong that people will tie their sense of self up with internet celebrities and refrain from criticizing them accordingly but that doesn’t mean that instincts for someone whom you have ever met justify showing up to vindicate yourself in a thread like this. If you were a victim in a position like this, do you think seeing people say “oh I always knew he was bad” makes you feel any better for putting your faith in someone like this? Do you think that Linus, if he were innocent (not saying he is or isn’t I’m using it to illustrate a hypothetical) wants to see people saying they always thought he was a horrible person if this all shakes out in a way that absolves him of Madison’s abuse with LMG? Who does it benefit to say that you always knew someone was bad?
Trust your instincts, absolutely. You don’t need to engage with someone if you don’t think they’re good people. But saying “I KNEW” implies you had perfect information, it implies that you’re smarter than dozens of other people about how a situation like this would eventually resolve. That doesn’t benefit anybody, it’s better and more productive to go to the victims, support them, listen to them, and let them speak their piece because ultimately situations like this have to be about them, not about you and how you got a bad vibe from someone on a YouTube video or a Livestream or a few tweets.
You keep making this about ego or me trying to “sound smart” and it’s utterly exhausting because I’m trying to encourage others, not prop up myself. It’s simply not about my ego or self-esteem (no matter how badly you want that straw man to stand up). My entire point is that people should trust their instincts more than they do. And no, I’m not absolving him of any crimes by doing this (that’s more straw man).
Since you insist on projection, I’m going to indulge in some here. It sounds like you just want to engage in a virtue competition here, and you’re reading a lot of consequences and implications into what I said that, in my view, are simply not there. It’s not that I think everything you’re saying is wrong. It’s not. It’s just so twisted out of context and I have to ask myself why. Is Pixel arguing in bad faith in order to do what Pixel is accusing me of? Which is to look smart (or virtuous) on the internet? I don’t know, but the optics are pretty bad at this point.
I want to be clear I’m not blaming you specifically here, or I’m not trying to paint you as a bad actor intentionally. I’m saying that this trend of behavior is common around drama discourse, and I think it’s to the detriment of the situation overall. You’re free to act as you please, you’re free to think I’m virtue signaling, that’s fine and I’m not going to push on that. I’m just trying to use this as an illustration of something that I, as my own individual person, see as an issue surrounding this type of discourse and I wanted to make a point about it accordingly