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The claim is that... LoTT is not familiar with weird people on the internet?
There are different kinds of weirdness. There is sincere weirdness. For example, some-one might believe that women punch just as hard as men, put their opinion on the internet, and be upset when other people reply with insults. There is trickster weirdness. For example, some-one (call them Tricky) might create a fake account that posts the claim that women punch just as hard as men. Later, when some-one else (call them Gully) thinks that the fake account is real, Tricky will enjoy using his real account to call out Gully for being gullible for thinking the fake account was real.
One might discover sincere weirdness on the internet and spend a merry year or two shining a light on it. Only later does one discover that trickster weirdness exists, and realize that one was in fact Gully from the paragraph above, and had blundered into being Tricky's lolcow.
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We've already established that LoTT didn't recognize the in-jokes, so I'd answer "obviously not familiar enough".
That doesn't answer the question of whether she should have, though. It seems pretty clear to me that it was simply too good to check.
In any case, it's a little strange to say that a culture warrior with 3M followers is a "normie" or "random person".
What do you mean 'didn't check'? TW, by his own admission, claimed that he believed the 'jig was up' when LoTT kept asking for, gasp, more evidence of their claim!
Leading to them faking copies of the handouts.
Stop trying to play this off as LoTT just blindly accepting whatever was sent to her. She never did.
I don't know if it's actually better that she apparently did all this due diligence and still fell for it.
Can you explicitly make the argument for how it's anything other than obviously better? Is the idea that the hoax claim was so obviously wrong, any fabricated evidence should be automatically dismissed? Because if so, that's absurd. We have enough documented cases of insane things happening in schools, that this one would barely move the needle. The whole hoax is about on the same level as "joke's on them I was merely pretending to be retarded".
Sure. If you're just publishing everything you get, and you publish some nonsense, that's one thing - you're publishing everything, you're not trying or pretending to actually evaluate it.
If you actually do due diligence, and you end up eating the onion, that's worse. You can't even (as people in this thread claim) act like a helpless normie, because helpless normies don't give a shit about due diligence. Instead, you do due diligence if you have a sense that you have a platform and a reputation you need to guard.
So perhaps I can see the argument for "she's a savvy operator and we should blame her for fucking this up" or "she's a rube, of course she ate the bait" but going for "she's savvy and it's not her fault" is incoherent.
And where are you getting "she's savvy" from? She didn't just take a story that flatters her biases at face value, and asked for evidence, that doesn't mean she's savvy, that means she does basic due diligence. It also means people portraying her as uncritically boosting any story that fitts her bias are dishonest.
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There are degrees of due diligence and degrees of how much effort you'd expect hoaxers to put into hoaxes, so this doesn't follow. It's not all or nothing.
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