Jeremy Merrill
jeremybmerrill.com
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.
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.
www.washingtonpost.com
April 25, 2025 at 5:40 PM
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...
Document
www.sec.gov
April 1, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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.
February 7, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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...
www.washingtonpost.com
February 6, 2025 at 8:56 PM
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...
February 7, 2025 at 12:45 AM
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.
February 4, 2025 at 9:48 PM
... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...
Dad Jokes | Fatherhood.gov
www.fatherhood.gov
February 4, 2025 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
Fun fact: there used to be a different Gulf of America...in the Sea of Japan archive.org/details/grea...
Great Soviet encyclopedia : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
v. : 29 cm
archive.org
January 23, 2025 at 1:45 AM
"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...
news.softpedia.com
January 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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
January 14, 2025 at 2:27 AM
more like justin trudeaun't amirite
January 6, 2025 at 4:19 PM
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
December 19, 2024 at 6:17 PM
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
December 17, 2024 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
The problem of single women learning to cope with the scarcity of suitable men? blockchain fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi
November 30, 2024 at 9:10 PM
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.
December 2, 2024 at 6:39 PM
Yup.
The problem of being a modern male? crypto fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi
November 29, 2024 at 7:26 PM
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.
November 29, 2024 at 3:27 PM
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
November 13, 2024 at 8:10 PM
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
November 13, 2024 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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...
November 4, 2024 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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
October 29, 2024 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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.
www.washingtonpost.com
November 3, 2024 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Jeremy Merrill
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
October 13, 2023 at 2:39 PM
If accelerationism is increasing every day, should we call it jerk-ism?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(p...
Jerk (physics) - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
October 13, 2023 at 12:44 AM
I'm so jealous of this
sudafed for my real friends, and real feds for my pseudo friends
October 12, 2023 at 1:56 AM