The beginning of the new year comes with the irresistible urge to start over fresh, which means it's a great time to get a haircut. This decade's first big hair trends include looks at every length that can be tailored to your hair texture and personal style. For anyone with a blunt bob — the most popular haircut of the past few years — you probably already guessed that the cut will still be going strong into the next decade. But there will be a few tweaks. As seen on Kerry Washington, 2020's bob has textured, softer edges, and looks amazing whether you part it down the middle or off to the side. RELATED: The 10 Hairstyles You'll See Everywhere This Winter But if you swear that 2020 is going to be the year you finally grow out your hair, let Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian's extra-long lengths be your inspiration. Or, you can get the look instantly with the help of some clip in extensions. To help you figure out how to wear your hair in the new year, we've rounded up the five biggest haircut trends of 2020, so you'll be sure of what you want before you head to the salon in January. VIDEO: The Five Biggest Haircut Trends of 2020<doc-sep>"She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it," the statement said, adding that "she understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at the Times".<doc-sep>The New York Times announced this week that tech journalist Sarah Jeong will join its editorial board — and the ensuing outcry from right-wing Twitter was both swift and familiar. Jeong is a venerated tech culture journalist with a broad range of expertise, known for everything from authoring a book on systemic online harassment to reporting on major internet case law. (She’s currently a senior writer at Vox’s sister site The Verge, which she’ll be departing for the Times.) She’s also an outspoken progressive and feminist, making her an obvious target for the right-wing internet mobs that have been especially active of late, launching organized smear campaigns against left-leaning celebrities by weaponizing their old jokes and tweets. The most high-profile recent example of this is Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, who was fired by Disney after a concerted push to dredge up and circulate several of Gunn’s old tweets. Many of the tweets contained jokes about topics like rape and pedophilia — but they were also several years old, purposely taken out of context, and pointedly curated and misrepresented to paint a very specific picture of Gunn with the express goal of getting him fired. A similar thing happened to Jeong, and the resulting fray became something of a test for the New York Times, as well as a test of the power of alt-right internet mobs. In this case, the mob lost — which might be a sign that one of the alt-right’s signature trolling tactics is losing its effectiveness. But it’s also a cautionary tale that in this new era of social media deep-diving, no one’s past is safe from scrutiny. After the New York Times announced Jeong’s hiring, the alt-right used her old tweets to accuse her of being racist against white people Once Jeong’s hiring was announced, her detractors immediately started digging through her internet history to see what they could find. A survey of Jeong’s past commentary on Twitter reveals several mainly sarcastic tweets dating back to 2013, which were largely discussing and responding to the oppressive mentality of white culture: In tweets like the one embedded above, Jeong appeared to be commenting on the idea that white people often believe they are being discriminated against when they aren’t. To equate “being mean to white people” with the actual systemic oppression and marginalization of minority groups is a false equivalency. But Jeong’s detractors removed this type of context, and began to circulate her old tweets in curated roundups that quickly went viral: Meet the newest member of the New York Times editorial board. I'd say that these tweets were part of her resumè when she applied for the job. pic.twitter.com/CLgFvPeAgM — Garbage Human (@GarbageHuman_) August 2, 2018 The screencapped tweets painted a picture of Jeong sarcastically engaging in the same hyperbolic ranting rhetoric employed by alt-right internet groups like Gamergate. As members of those movements have done countless times before, Jeong’s detractors organized to deploy a system of performative outrage, using the screencaps as “evidence” that Jeong was racist and launching a torrent of violent, racist, and misogynistic speech at both Jeong and the New York Times to voice its displeasure. The screencapped tweets also circulated among fringe alt-right sites like the Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit. The cries of racism against Jeong then drew supporters in the mainstream — including writer Andrew Sullivan, who published a widely derided opinion piece that characterized Jeong’s comments as promoting “eliminationist rhetoric” and portraying white people as “subhuman.” On Thursday morning, Jeong issued a statement. As a female journalist on the internet as well as a woman of color, she is no stranger to harassment — as she herself noted before explaining that in the tweets being circulated as proof of her supposed “racism,” she had been engaging “in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling.” Jeong wrote: While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again. (It’s also worth noting that since the Times announcement of her hiring, she has been staving off an onslaught of racist and misogynistic comments.) Amid the backlash, the Times came to Jeong’s defense and stood by its decision to hire her. In a statement issued Thursday, it acknowledged having “candid conversations” and reviewing Jeong’s social media history as part of a “thorough vetting process.” While the Times explicitly stated that it “does not condone” Jeong’s past tweets, it also made clear that it understood the context in which they were made. Our statement in response to criticism of the hiring of Sarah Jeong. pic.twitter.com/WryIgbaoqg — NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) August 2, 2018 Editors at the Verge followed with a scathing condemnation of the bullying tactics being used by Jeong’s detractors. And many of Jeong’s fellow journalists spent the day defending her on Twitter. The Times statement might seem like a surprising show of support from a media outlet that’s occasionally been perceived as willing to entertain “both sides” rhetoric around these kinds of issues. But the New York Times has also been around this block before — quite recently, in fact. Many people have compared Jeong’s old tweets to those of Quinn Norton, who was let go from the Times’s editorial board in part because her old tweets were resurfaced In February, the New York Times briefly attempted to hire another tech writer, Quinn Norton, as a member of its editorial board. Norton, a journalist known for being deeply embedded within online hacker culture, seemed like as good a fit as any for the paper — until it was discovered 1) that she had openly supported the notorious neo-Nazi weev, a famous hacker whose outright anti-Semitism ultimately led to his becoming a staff member of one of the internet’s most notorious white supremacist websites; and 2) that her Twitter history contained several instances where she used gay and racial slurs. As recently as last fall, Norton had defended her friendship with weev, asserting that “having racist friends and family” is “an inevitable part of whiteness” and that the real problem is that the act of shunning them “enables and perpetuates their racism and the harm it does in the world.” So when the Times announced its hiring of Norton, it kicked off a debate over whether her friendship with weev amounted to a tacit sanctioning of his beliefs. Adding fuel to the fire were older tweets in which she used the kind of offensive language frequent within hacker culture. Motivated Twitter sleuths quickly unearthed several instances, ceasing after 2014, in which Norton posted tweets containing gay slurs and in at least two instances dropped the n-word. Norton would later acknowledge that they “weren’t my best tweets,” claiming she’d been trying to fit in with the hacker culture she wrote about. Less than 24 hours after announcing Norton’s hiring, the Times’s opinion editor, James Bennet, issued a statement declaring that Norton would not be working with the Times after all: NYT and Quinn Norton go their “separate ways,” per statement from editorial page editor James Bennet pic.twitter.com/bE7cr6ZQIN — Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) February 14, 2018 (The “new information” was presumably the revelation of Norton’s social media history and friendship with weev.) Meanwhile, Norton claimed “no harm, no foul” and stated that the backlash against her hiring was an example of “context collapse,” or a moment when two sides approach the same conversation with totally different mindsets. From her perspective, the intense focus on her friendship with weev and on her old tweets led to the larger context of her socially progressive past work and writing being dismissed. But in retrospect, Norton’s un-hiring was the opposite of context collapse — in that the debate over her hiring, and the Times’s subsequent response, did very thoroughly consider the context surrounding both her friendship with weev and her old offensive tweets.<doc-sep>
If you follow a lot of politically-minded or media-involved people on Twitter, there was one topic of interest online Friday that incited visceral feelings of anger on both sides of the aisle: the hiring and subsequent shaming of Sarah Jeong and The New York Times. The issue at hand was the political correctness, or lack thereof, of Jeong’s tweets, which openly mocked white people. But what the conversation has largely failed to take into account is the fact that the situation was precipitated by an alt-right trolling campaign that has target other liberal-leaning media and entertainment figures who have come under fire recently for past social media offenses. And that in itself is more worrisome than any series of tweets. Why Is the Internet Upset About The New York Times’ New Hire? 30-year-old Jeong is an accomplished technology journalist and lawyer who worked at The Verge as a senior writer until announcing her new position on The New York Times editorial board as its lead technology writer this week. Since then, users of 4chan’s /pol/, or “politically incorrect” discussion board dug up past tweets of Jeong to label her as an anti-white racist. Jeong has since publicly apologized for her past tweets, which she says were a form of “counter-trolling” the “torrents of online hate” that she received as a young, Asian woman. She alleges that her tweets, which were barbed with racial gallows humor, were intended as satire rather than harassment. A quick review of the most incendiary tweets include “#CancelWhitePeople,” “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” The tweets are harsh and colorful, posted in 2014, and are certainly comparable to plenty of internet speech on both the right and left. Not only are Jeong’s tweets old, purposefully taken out of context, and curated with the intent of getting her fired, but her so-called racist rhetoric is simply an imitation of the white, privileged insults hurled at Jeong, her gender, and her race previously. When Jeong’s detractors equate her tweets with anti-white racism, they choose to ignore both the hypocrisy of the alt-right in painting her with a very specific picture and the false equivalency of hurting people’s feelings with the actual systemic oppression and marginalization of non-white people. The Verge published an editorial defending its senior writer, calling the “abusive backlash… dishonest and outrageous.” It asked newsrooms to identify online trolls as strategically dividing and conquering publications one colleague at a time and compared the tactics to Gamergate. The New York Times issued a similarly intentioned statement, noting that it does not condone Jeong’s tweets. What Do 4chan and Alt-Right Trolls Have to Do With Sarah Jeong? If this scenario sounds eerily similar to one that occurred just two weeks ago with the firing of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, that’s because the key instigators are the same exact breed. 4chan, the photo-based forum that spawned nude celebrity photo leak “The Fappening” and breeds incel and conspiracy theorist communities, has a forum of users hell-bent on exacting revenge on liberals. The furor was arguably ignited after the firing of Roseanne Barr, who regularly endorsed conspiracy theories like “QAnon” born on 4chan. Barr, was removed from her position due to a racist tweet, has since apologized, but other alt-right trolls are using the opportunity to seek revenge on liberal members of the media. First, trolls dug up Gunn’s pedophilia-related jokes on Twitter, and Disney quickly fired the director, to his cast’s disapproval. Then, 4chan went after Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon and female comedian Sarah Silverman. Now, the target has shifted to Jeong. But it’s clear that getting outspoken liberals fired isn’t the endgame. It’s creating further polarization, especially in the American media, and to divide and conquer similar-minded liberals. Trolls are wielding political correctness, not because they care about being offensive, but because they know the left does. Like The Verge warned, intimidation method is an attempt to “discredit and undo” the work journalists, media figures, and, more broadly, liberals do — by turning the left against itself.