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Oath CEO Tim Armstrong raved about the Oshry sisters weeks before canceling their show

The Instagram stars’ morning show was dropped soon after racist tweets surfaced and a family connection to an anti-Muslim activist was made public.

Instagram stars Jackie Oshrey and Claudia Oshry Soffer pictured at Beautycon Festival in May.
Instagram stars Jackie Oshrey and Claudia Oshry Soffer pictured at Beautycon Festival in May.
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Beautycon
Shirin Ghaffary
Shirin Ghaffary was a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.

Tech platform Oath canceled its millennial-oriented news show “The Morning Breath” earlier this week after its Instagram-star hosts, the Oshry sisters, were revealed to be the daughters of a prominent anti-Muslim activist and that two of the sisters had tweeted racist comments.

Here are some examples of controversial remarks hosts Jackie Oshry and Claudia Oshry Soffer posted in now-deleted tweets written six years ago, as reported by Taylor Lorenz of the Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast report revealed that the sisters’ mother is Pamela Geller, a vocal anti-Muslim political activist who has been called “one of the most flamboyant anti-Muslim activists in the United States” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The sisters have tried to distance themselves from their mother’s political beliefs, and in a teary-eyed video, Claudia Oshry Soffer said she was only a “dumb kid” when she posted the “stupid tweets.” Soffer became famous with her Girl With No Job, which has 2.8 million Instagram followers.

Soon after the Daily Beast article, Oath canceled the show and ended its partnership with the sisters.

But Oath CEO Tim Armstrong showered praise on the millennial media stars just a few weeks before they were fired. To be fair, reports of the Oshrys’ racism had not yet been made public.

Here’s what Armstrong had to say about the sisters at Recode’s Code Media Conference in February:

“The Oshry sisters are some of the most talented I work with. ... They’re incredibly talented and the impact they’re having in the younger news generation is going to be meaningful,” said Armstrong, later adding, “I can’t say enough about them, they’ve done a great job.”

Armstrong had also publicly tweeted his support of the sisters in the past.

Watch Tim Armstrong’s full interview at Code Media below:


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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