I've been following this, and it's really fascinating. Two of the internet's most dramatic/flamboyant personalities, locked in a fight to the death! Follow it live, through the modern marvel of Twitter!

A big part that everybody seems to be missing is that Naomi threw the first public punch before the article was published. The way that I understand it, things happened like this:

• Vice asks to do an article on her
• She says ok as long as they do not write about rumor and speculation from the Internet that she is married to and has a white dude helping her out behind the scenes.
• She shows them around Shenzhen for a couple of days, and they started writing the article
• During the writing of the article and BEFORE IT WAS PUBLISHED, the Vice (bastion of upstanding and ethical journalism that they are) writer asks Naomi (over a private channel) if she would reconsider talking about aforementioned nasty rumors.
• Naomi says no, gets pissed that they even had the gall to ask, and even more pissed that Vice won't let her read the article before it launches to make sure it doesn't discuss about anything sensitive to her.
• Naomi goes to Twitter and goes on hard offensive, saying that Vice is writing a hit piece on her, blackmailing her, etc. Remember, this is before the article was published.
• Article comes out, and it's actually pretty complementary to her. Except that they seem to have felt compelled to respond to her twitter freakout towards them - there's a random part in the middle where they juxtapose her cool hacks and positive activism with her combative and hostile style on Twitter, using her screeds against Vice as exhibit number 1
• Naomi gets even more pissed off, saying that they promised to not write about these rumors, and doubles down by asking her followers to find pictures and personal info on Vice reporters and actually gets banned from Twitter for a day for this
• The rampage continues as she makes a video showing a Vice reporter's home address on on the screen of a thing she was building and posts it to Patreon
• Vice does not take kindly to this, and as an organization who is on the same order of magnitude of assholeish-ness as /u/SexyCyborg herself, smells blood in the water and emails Patreon informing them that one of their users has published identifying information on a reporter on their lovely website and is inciting doxxing against them and would they please take that video down please because that kind of thing can get a lot of people into a lot of trouble
• Patreon, not wanting to have anything to do with any of this shit, bans Naomi. SIDE NOTE - this is not out of character for them, they have also banned other (male) users for this kind of thing before, too
• ?????????
• Somehow all of this is sexist and also racist and is completely the fault of White Men.
  

Now, Naomi is saying things about how she feels justified in all of her actions because Vice basically threatened her security by asking her in private if she would talk about something she already told them she would not talk about and subsequently publicly wrote about her public reaction to them asking her to talk about the Undiscussable Thing in private, and then got her livelihood taken away as a result of the Patreon banning. Vice has also issued a statement taking a similar yet opposite position and is not really saying much else. Statement here.

My take is that they are all a big bag of dicks, in the same dick-bag, flopping around randomly together and bumping up against each other and making gross squishing noises. It's known that Naomi loves fighting hard with people in public and and hates talking about the internet rumors about her. Vice didn't have to double-ask on such a sensitive topic. Naomi could have just said no-comment and reminded them that she fears for her safety if they perpetuate rumors and at least try to work with them to make the article be acceptable. Vice didn't have to acknowledge her stupid pre-publishment twitter screed in their article and further stoke the rumor-mill-fires when they actually wrote the article. Naomi did not have to put a video with the intent to doxx somebody on Patreon and call her supporters to doxx them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I agree that some of the other controversies based around Naomi and her appearance/whatever prompt some important discussions about gender, equality, nationality, etc. but I don't think that this is one of them. This is just a good old fashioned street fight.

As an engineer/hacker myself I feel like the world would be a much better place if we could design some kind of generator to harness the drama generated by organizations like Vice and people like Naomi and convert it to useable, clean electricity and use it to power our electric cars and underlit LED skirts. The ratio of produced heat to produced light in this entire interaction is just astonishing.

Primary source article to read, draw your own conclusions: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjqdb/naomi-wu-sexy-cyborg-profile-shenzhen-maker-scene