From what I can gather from the published journal article it appears that if these paragraphs of ad hominems were in it they did not survive the review process: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
Unfortunately I don't know how to find the pre-publication submission.
@anonymouskimmer: I just held my nose and did as you advised, search the article on "sciencebasedmedicine.org" for the phrase you quoted.
I think this is what UncleMeat refers to as "insulting the physical appearance" of grad students who disagreed with him on twitter:
At that time, the name of the Twitter account owner was not obviously visible (the photo showed an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat), but Meyerowitz-Katz seemed to use the Twitter account prolifically to promote his own work and criticize work contradicting his work. The identity of the Health Nerd Twitter account has become transparent now, since the owner has added a photo of him (wearing a T-shirt that writes “Trust me, I am an epidemiologist”).
In summary, what Ioannidis said was that the twitter account showed an image of someone with big glasses and a cat, and that the owner posted a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt with a slogan.
I would like to say that I struggle to find how that is insulting, but in truth I don't struggle at all. That's all happening on twitter where anything anyone says is insulting to someone. I mean, if he had said something along the lines of "what stupid glasses" or "what stupid t-shirt", yeah, that would have been insulting in the real world. But "an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat)" is an insult- how? To whom? The unrecognisable figure? The cat?
So it's just as I said above, as expected. That whole thing was something inconsequential that social media made a huge todo about because it's social media and people are on it when they have nothing to do. I'm on it right now, I guess, and I actually do have things to do, so ttyl.
I don't disagree with you. Some people with social media get riled up on social media. Those without I guess can get riled up in supplementary material. I assume this happened a lot more in the days when journals were basically it for scientific communication (the 17 and 18 hundreds).