Before “platform pile-on” was a fixed phrase and before X stopped being Twitter, the December 2010 #MooreandMe campaign was the genre’s prototype: a hashtag aimed at two cable-left celebrities, a refusal to let them off the hook, and a public figure who eventually rage-quit the site. The platform’s gone in everything but name. The argument is what stuck around.
Then
In mid-December 2010, Michael Moore appeared on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann and characterized the Swedish sexual-assault investigation of Julian Assange as “a bunch of hooey” — describing the allegations as a broken-condom matter in what was already consensual sex. The actual case file, as reported in The Guardian among others, was substantially more serious than that.
The mischaracterization sparked a hashtag campaign organized by feminist writer Sady Doyle on the blog Tigerbeatdown. The tag was #MooreandMe and the demand was narrow: a correction, an apology for the framing, an acknowledgment that dismissing rape allegations on national cable wasn’t a politically protected act because the accused happened to be a left-coded figure. The campaign ran for days.
Moore, a heavy Twitter user, didn’t engage. Olbermann did — he was on the platform constantly, and he tried. He apologized for any failure of “full sensitivity,” defended a retweet that critics said named accusers, eventually acknowledged Assange could in fact be guilty and that a real investigation was warranted. By the Thursday of that week, the tweets had reached a volume that prompted Olbermann to quit the platform in frustration. He came back the following Monday with a longer statement addressing the abuse he’d taken, but never the Moore correction the campaign had actually been asking for.
Now
The factual record on the Assange Swedish case is a different document now than it was in 2010. After years of his time at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, an extended UK extradition fight to the United States, and his eventual release in mid-2024 after a plea deal that returned him to Australia, the Swedish investigations themselves were closed without charges in 2019, with prosecutors citing time-elapsed evidentiary problems rather than disposition on the merits. None of that retrospectively makes the December 2010 framing on Countdown accurate; it does mean the case the Twitter campaign was rallying around has resolved in a way nobody on that thread was predicting.
Olbermann left MSNBC weeks after the #MooreandMe episode and has spent the years since cycling between Current TV, ESPN, a return to MSNBC, a long YouTube and podcast run, and the eventual move off Twitter again — this time for political reasons after Elon Musk’s takeover. Michael Moore continues to publish via his Substack newsletter and has remained politically active in documentary and commentary work. Sady Doyle’s writing has migrated from group blogs to a substack and books on gender and horror, and she has occasionally cited #MooreandMe as a template — both for what hashtag organizing made possible and for the structural reasons it was unsustainable at scale.
The platform the entire episode happened on no longer exists under that name. The argument it produced — about who gets the benefit of the doubt when the politics are sympathetic — has not moved much.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: December 2010 snapshot