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Jeremy Merrill

@jeremybmerrill.com

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.

324 Posts11146 Follower444 Folgt
Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · 3mo ago

I wondered: How much has the legalization of online sports gambling transformed watching sports on TV? We got an AI to watch fifty hours of sports to find out. Every single game had gambling ads, promotions or other references. Every single one! But some sports had far more than others.

an event plot shows minutes in a typical hour of six sports featuring a gambling reference. NCAA women's basketball is the most, but it's almost all ESPN ticker's with odds. NHL hockey is second, with forty minutes shaded, mostly from in-arena ads. NBA basketball has the third-most. NFL football, NCAA basketball and NCAA men's basketball have the least -- about 4 to 5 minutes a game.
Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · 8mo ago

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.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy-b-merrill-644b1412_how-does-tiktoks-algorithm-figure-out-if-activity-7407155110214250496-K9Bl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAKoE5QBuFNKEL2yq0MZ4ZtO-_pmoGqU1l0
Meghan Hoyer@meghanhoyer.bsky.social · 8mo ago

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...

Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal

We re-created TikTok’s algorithm based on 1,100 users’ feeds. Explore which topics are in your feed and see what the algorithm is least likely to show you.

washingtonpost.com

Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · last yr.

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...

How Trump team turned a dinner invite into a crypto boon worth millions

Nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP meme coins, worth roughly $100 million, after the team said top buyers could join the president for dinner.

washingtonpost.com

Ence Morse@ence.bsky.social · last yr.

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.

The next conservative Administration should restore and build on the Trump Administration’s counter-China infrastructure at USAID, end the climate policy fanaticism that advantages Beijing, and assess bilateral aid through the lens of U.S. national security interests, rewarding those countries that resist China’s debt diplomacy. It should finance programs designed to counter specific Chinese efforts in strategically important countries and eliminate funding to any partner that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. USAID’s Bangkok-based Regional Development Mission for Asia should focus its strategic attention on supporting cross-border initiatives designed to counter Chinese influence.
Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · last yr.

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.

analytics.usa.gov | The US government's web traffic.

Official data on web traffic to thousands of US federal government websites. Published by the Digital Analytics Program.

analytics.usa.gov

Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · last yr.

... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...

Doug MacMillan@douglasmac.bsky.social · 2y ago

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 ->

Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches

Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps; at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested.

wapo.st

Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · 2y ago

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

A chart shows the view count trajectory of Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's tweets, titled "Views of each X post in 26 days around the election". Elon Musk has many above 100 million, while Trump's are all less than 100 million.
Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · 2y ago

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.

an untitled bimodal distribution, with a bit spike around 0.8 and a much smaller spike around 0.1. y-axis goes to 350 from 0.
Jeremy Merrill@jeremybmerrill.com · 2y ago

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

A histogram of the proportion of TikTok feeds that is about politics or social issues. The big peak is around 6-10%, with a long right tail towards 25% or 30%, and a small left tail towards 1% and 2%.
Caitlin Gilbert@caitlingilbert.bsky.social · 2y ago

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...

What’s in your TikTok feed? As elections near, it may depend on gender.

A Washington Post analysis of six months of feeds points to gender differences in how the hugely popular platform serves up political news.

washingtonpost.com

Mike Stucka@mikestucka.bsky.social · 3y ago

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.

Data Journalist, Politics

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news and information for the people of Atlanta, of Georgia and the South.  To achieve that mission, we ...

jobs.coxenterprises.com