So far from everything I've read of her tweets, she's like Brianna Wu, if Brianna Wu was a woman and based her identity around having herpes instead of being a "video gamer/engineer/woman in tech"
You, too, can base your entire identity around the culmination of your poor lifestyle choices.
Pretty much. The internet is infected like a gangrenous limb, filled with idiots making a living out of their opinions. We used to call them newspaper columnists and while there still far too many of those, they were significantly outnumbered by actual reporters reporting things that happened. (In theory, anyway. I think we can safely say tabloids and celebrity stalkers don't count. And official government media centres. Or banks and other PR machines.) With the internet, any bloody idiot can Google something and find information that suits them and their views. People like Dawson will spend half an hour reading about something and then spend a few days writing about it. The internet is pure information, incredibly accessible and nearly impossible to censor. Even fifteen years ago it'd take you days to find something that you can now find in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the same problem that's plagued mankind since the first anatomically modern human came up with the idea of scratching lines on a stick and carrying it to the tribe in the next valley still remains to this day: people are incapable of passing on information without that information being coloured by their own experience, and other people are incapable of interpenetrating that information outside of their own personal history and cultural beliefs. And if they are don't like that information, they'll go to great lengths to find something that proves it wrong and them right.
"Social activists" like Dawson and the rest of the SJW cult, and the MRAs, and the raw food dieters, and vegetarians, and the insert-supreme-race-here, and the various kinds of god botherers, and yes, the scientists, do NOT want to be confronted with things that they don't agree with or doesn't fit into the world as they see it. But while scientists will often take an idea and dissect to prove it wrong, often they'll just sneer at it and go straight around it. Socially, there's often very little that can convince people to re-examine their beliefs and question them, even in the face of a pack of Islamic rapeugees on New Year's Eve.
Dawson is essentially just a mouthpiece. " Hey, she speaks well, writes well, says everything that I think she should say! She must be a great journalist and really, really smart! I'm so lucky to find someone who is as smart as I am! Oh wait, she's advocating spreading STDs around! That makes her edgy and progressive! That means I'm edgy and progressive too! Look at how awesome I am!"
Basically, 80% of the internet is urban legends told by Chinese Whispers in the middle of a massive cave full of echoes. Dawson is popular with a certain type of people who like to sit in a particular place in the cave. She's got hearing that's better than most, and she interprets the echoes in ways her audiences find agreeable. And with all these echoes repeating over and over again, they become accepted as fact purely because everyone knows it's true, therefore there is absolutely no reason for any form of dispassionate research on genuine sources.
Dawson is effectively a company spokesman getting away with abusing the hell out of their rival companies. Unfortunately, successfully suing a private individual for slander on the internet is nearly impossible. So Dawson and her employers whoops I mean sycophants can say anything they want to about anyone, and she can tell them exactly what they want to hear. She's not making a living out of her opinions and identity; she's making a living out of everyone else's.
