Sam Biddle

Last updated
Sam Biddle
Born
Sam Faulkner Biddle

1986 (age 36–37) [1]
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Johns Hopkins University [2]
OccupationJournalist
Employer(s) The Intercept
Gawker Media (formerly)
Parent
  • Wayne Biddle [2] (father)

Sam Faulkner Biddle (born 1986) is an American technology journalist. He is a reporter for The Intercept , and was formerly a senior writer at Gawker, the editor of the news website Valleywag, and a reporter at Gizmodo. [3]

Contents

Education

Biddle attended Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity and majored in philosophy. [2]

Career

Biddle was formerly the editor of Valleywag, a technology news website owned by Gawker Media. In October 2014, he announced that he was leaving Valleywag and taking a sabbatical, after which he took another reporting position at Gawker. His writing focuses on Internet issues, such as cybersecurity and online political activism. [3] In 2014, he was one of Vanity Fair's "News Disrupters," a "new breed of journo-entrepreneurs [striking] out on their own, cutting to the chase and influencing the masses without (much of) a filter." [4]

Biddle's articles have at times criticizing and making fun of technology companies and affluent people in the San Francisco Bay Area. [5] New York Magazine has referred to Biddle as "perhaps the most hated journalist in the Bay Area", [6] while an article in PandoDaily attacked him as a "grotesque hypocrite". [2]

Online shaming incident

Biddle played an important role in the online shaming of a woman in December 2013 after she had tweeted "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm white!" to her 173 Twitter followers. Biddle posted her public tweet to Gawker, and the woman was later fired after considerable global media coverage of her tweet. In January 2014, Biddle said "It's satisfying to be able to say, 'O.K., let's make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.' And it did. I'd do it again." [7] In June 2014, when the woman found a job at Hot or Not, Biddle wrote: "How perfect! Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together." [7] [8] The woman later defended herself, offering that she (a South African) had intended her tweet to "mimic—and mock—what an actual racist, ignorant person would say of South Africa." [7] [9] After the Bring Back Bullying incident, he posted a public apology. [7]

Gamergate and "Bring Back Bullying"

Biddle experienced being a target of a similar online shaming incident in 2014 after tweeting "Bring Back Bullying", and "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission," [10] during the Gamergate controversy. He received what he called "a whirlpool of spleen and choler swelling till it had sucked in most of my energy and attention, along with that of many of my coworkers." People tweeted at and emailed him, his supervisors, and Gawker advertisers to demand Biddle's firing and call for boycotts of advertisers. Gamergate supporters posted a list of Gawker's advertisers online, and contacted them in a campaign to force them to pull ad campaigns from Gawker websites. [3] Adobe Systems then pulled its sponsorship in response. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monica Lewinsky</span> American former White House intern

Monica Samille Lewinsky is an American activist and writer. A former White House intern, Lewinsky gained international celebrity status in the late 1990s as a result of the public coverage of a political scandal when U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted to having an affair with her during her days as an intern between 1995 and 1997. The affair, and its repercussions, became known later as the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal.

<i>Wonkette</i> American online magazine

Wonkette is an American online magazine of topical and political gossip, established in 2004 by Gawker Media and founding editor Ana Marie Cox. The editor since 2012 is Rebecca Schoenkopf, formerly of OC Weekly. Wonkette covers U.S. politics in a satirical manner.

Gawker was an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers and based in New York City focusing on celebrities and the media industry. According to SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month as of 2015. Founded in 2002, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gawker Media</span> Former British-American online media company and blog network

Gawker Media LLC was an American online media company and blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as of 2012, Gawker Media was the parent company for seven different weblogs and many subsites under them: Gawker.com, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. In 2004, the company renamed from Blogwire, Inc. to Gawker Media, Inc., and to Gawker Media LLC shortly after.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Denton</span> British Internet entrepreneur and journalist (born 1966)

Nicholas Guido Anthony Denton is a British Internet entrepreneur, journalist, and blogger. He is the founder and former proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and was the managing editor of the New York City-based Gawker, until a lawsuit by Terry Bollea bankrupted the company.

Kotaku is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valleywag</span>

Valleywag was a Gawker Media blog with gossip and news about Silicon Valley personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas left in May 2009, and was replaced by Ryan Tate.

The Daily Beast is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is owned by IAC Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Owen Thomas (writer)</span> American tech and business journalist

Owen Thomas is an American blogger, journalist, and entrepreneur who serves as managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times.

weev Internet troll and hacker

Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer, best known by his pseudonym weev, is an American computer hacker and professional Internet troll. Affiliated with the alt-right, the Southern Poverty Law Center has described him as being a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and antisemitic conspiracy theorist. He has used many aliases when he has contacted the media, but most sources state that his real first name is Andrew.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doxing</span> Publication of the private details of individuals, often on the Internet

Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregation of this information from public databases and social media websites, as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means. The aggregation and provision of previously published material is generally a legal practice, though it may be subject to laws concerning stalking and intimidation. Doxing may be carried out for reasons such as online shaming, extortion, and vigilante aid to law enforcement. It also may be associated with hacktivism.

PandoDaily, or simply Pando, was a web publication offering technology news, analysis, and commentary, with a focus on Silicon Valley and startup companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Chen</span> American journalist

Adrian Chen is an American blogger, and former staff writer at The New Yorker. Chen joined Gawker in November 2009 as a night shift editor, graduating from an internship position at Slate, and has written extensively on Internet culture, especially virtual communities such as 4chan and Reddit. Chen is the creator of The Pamphlette, a "humor publication" for Reed College students on a piece of letter-size paper. He has written for The New York Times, New York magazine, Wired, and other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melissa Gira Grant</span> American journalist

Melissa Gira Grant is an American journalist. She is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore, and co-editor of the ebook Coming and Crying.

Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others. The harassment campaign included doxing, rape threats, and death threats.

<i>So Youve Been Publicly Shamed</i> 2015 nonfiction book by Jon Ronson

So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a 2015 book by British journalist Jon Ronson about online shaming and its historical antecedents. The book explores the re-emergence of public shaming as an Internet phenomenon, particularly on Twitter. As a state-sanctioned punishment, public shaming was popular in Colonial America. Between 1837 in the UK and 1839 in the US, it was phased out as a punishment, not due to the increasingly populous society, as was widely held, but instead in response to rising calls for compassion.

Online shaming is a form of public shaming in which targets are publicly humiliated on the internet, via social media platforms, or more localized media. As online shaming frequently involves exposing private information on the Internet, the ethics of public humiliation has been a source of debate over internet privacy and media ethics. Online shaming takes many forms, including call-outs, cancellation, doxing, negative reviews, and revenge porn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Jeong</span> American journalist (born 1988)

Sarah Jeong is an American journalist specializing in information technology law and other technology-related topics. A member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 2018 to 2019, she was formerly a senior writer for The Verge and a contributing editor for Vice Media's Motherboard website. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a non-fiction book about online harassment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sleeping Giants</span> Social media activism organization

Sleeping Giants is a social media activism organization aiming to pressure companies into removing advertisements from conservative news outlets. The campaign started in November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, with the launch of a Twitter account aiming to boycott Breitbart News. The campaign has sections in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Germany.

Donglegate was an online shaming incident. A double entendre on the word "dongle" was overheard at a Python Conference (PyCon) programmers' convention on March 17, 2013, which led to two people being fired and a denial-of-service attack.

References

  1. ↑ Myers, Courtney Boyd (February 17, 2014). "The 'Real' Sam Biddle: Manicuring Mom Is Kind of Concerned About Valleywag Editor Who Shares Her Name". New York Observer . Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Carr, Paul (December 26, 2013). "Look Who's Gawking: Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers". PandoDaily . Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Shontell, Alyson (October 24, 2014). "Sam Biddle Is Leaving Valleywag". Business Insider . Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  4. ↑ Ellison, Sarah (10 September 2014). "News Disrupters: The New Breed of Journalists Striking Out on Their Own". Vanity Fair . Retrieved 2016-09-22.
  5. ↑ Manjoo, Farhad (29 August 2013). "Would You Just Look at All Those Rich People!". Slate . Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  6. ↑ Bennett, Laura (April 6, 2014). "Riding an Uber With Sam Biddle, the Tech World's Least Beloved Watchdog". New York . Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Ronson, Jon (February 12, 2015). "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life". The New York Times Magazine . Retrieved February 13, 2015. Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!
  8. ↑ Sam Biddle (17 June 2014). "Justine Sacco Is Back". Valleywag.
  9. ↑ Choire, Sicha (17 April 2015). "Jon Ronson's 'So You've Been Publicly Shamed'". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 May 2015.
  10. 1 2 Grieco, Sarah (October 24, 2014). "Gawker: The internet bully". Columbia Journalism Review .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.