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Sarah Jeong

Sarah Jeong

Features Editor

Features Editor

    More From Sarah Jeong

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    You can now watch talks from XOXO 2024.

    If you have FOMO about missing out on the very last XOXO festival, the official video recordings have begun rolling out one by one.

    Here’s my own talk, mostly about the harassment campaign that upended my life. I previously wrote about the experience as part of The Verge’s The Year Twitter Died package.

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    When is a retweet an official act?

    Earlier this summer, SCOTUS ruled that Trump is “absolutely immune” for any official acts on January 6. In an October Non-Surprise, prosecutors are arguing that Trump is being charged for unofficial acts.

    A partly-unsealed brief asserts, among other things, that Trump used his Twitter in a personal capacity while attempting to overturn the 2020 election, by tweeting and retweeting conspiracy theories and attacks on public officials. Although Trump sometimes tweeted about official White House business,

    ... he also regularly used the account to post on unambiguously private matters — for example, when he posted a picture of himself golfing with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, and re-tweeted a Trump Organization post about the Trump New York hotel being “named the # 1 ‘Best Hotel in the World!’”

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test, that’s the Supreme Court test,” said Tim Walz in tonight’s debate.

    It is not the Supreme Court test. The SCOTUS case the quote is from was overturned in 1969, when the court replaced the “clear and present danger” test with the Brandenburg test.

    Perhaps most incredibly, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance followed up and uncritically repeated the “fire in a crowded theater” phrase.

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Trump: “I got the oil business going like nobody’s done before.”

    Meanwhile, Trump claims that under a Harris presidency, “Oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar.”

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Harris: “I will not ban fracking.”

    I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States and in fact I was the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases on fracking.

    Climate advocates previously hoped Harris would take a tougher stance against fracking. This statement in tonight’s debate repeats a promise she made in her CNN interview last month.

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Harris wants to “win the race on AI and quantum computing.”

    In tonight’s debate, she describes her China policy as making sure the US “wins the competition for the 21st century” through investments in “American-based technology,” claiming that under Trump, American chips were sold to China and used to modernize its military.

    Trump counters, “They bought their chips from Taiwan. We hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have.” He then winds himself up into a tirade on Marxism?

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Who could have seen this coming?

    404 Media reached out to purported clients of Jacob Wohl’s AI lobbying firm. Six of them — including Microsoft, Palantir, and Pfizer — said they’d never heard of it. The other six didn’t respond.

    Wohl, who pleaded guilty to fraud in 2022, is perhaps best known for a series of “spectacularly failed smear attempts” directed at figures like Robert Mueller, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren.

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Does Threads have the wrong vibe for the displaced Brazilian internet?

    In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.

    A caveat from The Verge: we still don’t have official numbers on Brazilian sign-ups for Threads over the weekend.

    Sarah Jeong
    Sarah Jeong
    Hewlett Packard will still go after $4 billion from Mike Lynch’s estate.

    The Guardian reports that HP, embroiled in a legal saga with Mike Lynch for over a decade, will continue pressing for damages even after the tech tycoon’s confirmed death-by-superyacht.

    Lynch previously lost to HP in a UK civil suit, though he was acquitted of related fraud charges in a US criminal proceeding earlier this year. The Guardian writes:

    Lynch’s widow, Angela Bacares, was onboard the Bayesian when it sank but was among 15 people who were rescued. According to the Sunday Times rich list, Lynch and Bacares’s combined wealth was £500m.