Cotton caused a near-mutiny inside the New York Times, causing the newspaper to take a major reputational hit, after kowtowing to a mob of 'woke' journalists-activists (apparently a large faction among the NYT's reporters, many of whom claimed that the paper "put black reporters in danger" by publishing Cotton's editorial, not exactly the view of an "objective" journalist).

On Wednesday, as the debate over Silicon Valley censorship raged, Cotton published an editorial on Fox News' website, and later appeared on TV to share the story again. In it, he shared how "a low-level employee in Twitter's Washington office" nitpicked the language in one of his tweets - just like they recently did with President Trump's use of the phrase 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts', which the left claims has a 'secret racist history', Cotton used the phrase "no quarter", a common English-language idiom -  and threatened to permanently suspend his account if he didn't delete the tweet.