TikTok's algorithm knew how much Olympics content to give you four months early -- in April 2024. This chart shows quintile cohorts based on how much Olympics content users got during the Olympics (Jul/Aug). But -- amazingly -- the rank order of Olympics vids stays the same, even months beforehand.

We used 1,100 real users' data to help re-create TikTok’s algorithm, and then made a map, allowing you to explore the hidden divides that decide what content you see - and what you don't. Awesome work by @fox.computer, Leslie Shapiro & @jeremybmerrill.com: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Love this @jeremybmerrill.com @fox.computer piece mapping TikTok's brain, especially the tool they made to find a content theme's diametric opposite. People who like the "Fallout" games, for instance, aren't very interested in videos about having hair www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

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...

One 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.

Who 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...

Fun 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...

I'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

The 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

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

Fascinating 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...

New: 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

NEW: 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...

The 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.

The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, awful www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Reading 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]

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"

the 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.

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.

I sometimes wonder if I could sing of arms and a man, who, leaving Troy at the crack of dawn, set off for Italy, fleeing his fate.

“We’re like data journalists,” he said. “All we can do is inform people with power. The only power you have is being right.”

If you're thinking of the Roman empire instead of singing the song about the kings of Rome to the tune of the Flintstones theme, you're telling on yourself.

Happy almost Sukkot, folks.

Diane Feinstein and John McCain are the only two Senators to die in office in the last decade. A large decrease compared to the early/mid 20th century: 10 senators died during the just the 65th congress. Once common, Senate deaths in office are now rare www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

"folkrock for my real friends, a real croc for my faux friends"

Midrash for my real friends, real rash for my mid friends

"champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends" is a fun catchphrase, ya? I decided to get the computer to generate me more phrases like that. Here's another one the computer came up with: - "metrics for my real friends, real tricks for my meh friends" #linguistics #nlp

WITCHES: Back your ass up! Witches, your time is almost up!

My kid likes “Apples and Bananas” when he sings it at school. Not sure why he doesn’t like singing it with me. Maybe it’s all the extra verses I go through.

This kind of sparse bikeable exurbanism is illegal to build in most American counties.