Jeremy Merrill

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

why are you characterizing me as "having a meltdown"?

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.

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...

I don't think you've proven your headline.

A screenshot of EPA's Mangrove Swamps website, saying "Four species of tropical mangroves can be found around the Gulf of America. Their extensive root systems protect the coast from erosion and storm damage. The mangrove here (inset) is a red mangrove."

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.

Dad Jokes | Fatherhood.gov

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

Huh! Fascinating.

Great Soviet encyclopedia : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive v. : 29 cm

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...

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.

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

Yeah, it's fair question! The view count metrics act right, in that there aren't any sharp discontinuities and many US-focused accounts (i.e. not Elon and Trump) have slower increases overnight and faster increases during the day in the US.

Musk’s influence on X eclipses all members of the incoming Congress, combined The tech billionaire’s X account blasts his political messages to an audience far bigger than Trump reaches on the platform, data analysis by The Post shows.

gift link: wapo.st/3Dp2cO5

A bubble chart shows one huge orange bubble for Elon Musk's 127.6 billion views and a bunch of small and tiny green bubbles for Congress's 7.1 billion views

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

I don't think there's any evidence he's just making it up.

This was actually one of my research questions for this project: do view count stats over time make sense? And they do! Elon's follow a very consistent pattern. US-centric less-popular figures' view count growth slows overnight and accelerates during awake hours.

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.

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 was so tempted to buy this when I got the email about it the other day.

This one is not actually all that exciting! This is from an examination of TikTok. The x-axis is something like "average proportion of video watched" (I don't totally remember; old chart) and so the big cluster is regular videos and the lil cluster on the left is ads... which on average people skip.

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.

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.

Genuinely jazzed to un-forget about this bot, which proposes fixing literally every problem every discussed in (IIRC) 10 years of NYT articles, with crypto/web3/DeFi/Bitcoin.

Yup.

The spammer blocked me preemptively, which made it hard to trace this.

Would be nice if bsky would let custom-domain accounts block their default _______.bsky.app account to prevent this kind of thing.