Jeremy Merrill
dad, a reporter, data reporter (writing about tech at The Washington Post)
I don't have digital; I don't have diddly squat.
Linguistics, NLP, news, Jews, Atlanta, crypto regs/politics, ads, fraud, etc.
- 27 crypto wallets acquired ~$1,000,000+ of the president's memecoin after top holders were invited to a special dinner with Trump. It "creates the specter of a pay-to-play deal". So who are payers? There are hints that many aren't even American. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
- Newsmax just went public. Its 10-K annual report says: "A diverse and inclusive workplace is not merely a strategy or business objective; it is fundamentally woven in the fabric of the Company." www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillOne more thing to note about the USAID cuts: Project 2025's text actually recommended *more* USAID programs to counter China’s Belt + Road Initiative. and criticized Biden for discontinuing particular Trump-era USAID programs. Speaks to how quickly all this blew up.
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillWho put USAID on Elon Musk's radar? @sarahellison.bsky.social and I found that Musk only began posting about the agency after right-wing influencer Mike Benz appeared on Joe Rogan, calling the organization a CIA front. More: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
- There’s no more Gulf of Mexico Division of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s now the Gulf of America Division. As of Wednesday, the agency has also renamed the body of water even on obscure pages about mangrove swamps. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
- analytics.usa.gov says the US Government's official National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve website only got 861 pageviews in the past month. I think we can do better than that.
- ... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...
- ... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillFun fact: there used to be a different Gulf of America...in the Sea of Japan archive.org/details/grea...
- "Gulf of America" first sprung up in a pretty unexpected place. One of the first references I can find to the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Comes from Stephen Colbert and partially sponsored by... Bing. From 15ish years ago: news.softpedia.com/news/Bing-Do...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillI've spent the past year obsessed with how police are using facial recognition. What I found: Police in 12 states have used these tools to find and arrest suspects when they have no other evidence, leading to wrongful arrests wapo.st/4fQYlXn 🧵 what I learned from 1,000 docs & dozens of sources ->
- more like justin trudeaun't amirite
- Elon Musk's total view count on Twitter is way way bigger (16x) than that of Congress as a whole. chart by @kevinschaul.bsky.social
- Elon Musk has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. He got a total of 133 billion views since July, and ~1/3 of his posts are about politics. His typical tweet gets more than 2.4 million views in just one hour, according to our novel view-count time-series dataset. 🎁: wapo.st/3VLjlI6
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillThe problem of single women learning to cope with the scarcity of suitable men? blockchain fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi
- I like this chart. It tells a story. It's a bimodal distribution, which is my favorite kind of chart. It tells me that I've got two kinds of things: A bunch of the things on the right, centered at 0.8 and some of the things on the left, around 0.1 to 0.2.
- Yup.
- There's an imposter of me DMing people tips on how to make $700,000 via digital marketing. Real: @jeremybmerrill.com Fake: @jeremybmerrill.bsky.app Convincing. But it's not me.
- oh hey this was my chart that my job posted on this website, check out this chart I made last week
- A remarkable thing happened Tuesday night on an “election integrity” discussion page on the social media platform X, as it became clear that former president Donald Trump was headed to a decisive victory against Vice President Kamala Harris. It got quiet. wapo.st/40VIxPB
- TikTok's algorithm is super personalized -- and super opaque. So, my colleagues and I asked 1,000 people to send us their browsing histories, and we found: Most people get about 8% politics in their feeds, but a few get as much as 30%. gift link: wapo.st/40uSUJG
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillFascinating data here but I mostly love that women on TikTok were twice as likely as men to hear the “Freek-a-Leek" JD Vance I'm-a-Never-Trump-guy remix (which really is a banger) www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillNew: On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear. We analyzed 100 top political accounts and found that Republicans are getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show. Gift link: wapo.st/4fmNIvF w/ @jeremybmerrill.com
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillNEW: political content shown on TikTok can depend on your gender—women received ~11% more content about Harris than men did, while men (including liberal ones) were more likely to be shown videos about Trump w/ @jeremybmerrill.com @viacristiano.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillThe wonderful people at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are hiring a political data journalist to work full-time on political data, starting with 2024 elections. Minimum pay is around $80,000. Must move to Georgia but the company has a relocation stipend.
- If accelerationism is increasing every day, should we call it jerk-ism? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(p...
- I'm so jealous of this
- logging back into this website (and to Threads, and to Facebook) was a mistake.
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillThe final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, awful www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...
- Reposted by Jeremy MerrillReading about the part where "the initial data leak was limited, with the threat actor releasing 1 MILLION LINES OF DATA FOR ASHKENAZI PEOPLE." [caps mine]
- 23andMe confirms that it is aware of user data from its platform circulating on hacker forums and attributes the leak to a credential-stuffing attack (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
- Reposted by Jeremy Merrillthe German equivalent of "Vive le Roi" or "Long Live the King"... is it "Kaiser Permanente"?
- Idk that pie shop in Charlottesville and the too-good-for-the-South Jewish deli in Richmond would both be dangerous
- Much blame for AI that supposedly detects media bias belongs at the feet of "media bias fact check" -- some random folks' crappy opinion displayed in an infographic that ML engineers (true to form!) repeatedly mistake for ground-truth training data.
- AI to ✌️detect media bias✌️ continues to be the stupidest idea.
- After taking a look at which news articles have earned “very high reliability” scores from AI company Seekr, we only have more questions. www.niemanlab.org/2023/10/the-...
- Sham trials for the real president Real trials for the sham president (but he says they're sham trials)
- Which "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"-style toast is better? 1. ChatGPT's "Confetti for my loyal friends, bitter truth for my deceitful friends" Or 2. My algorithm's: "focus for my real friends, real cuss for my faux friends"
- Looking into this.
