WaPo: The 40-something single dad shaping liberal media from his laptop (Acyn from X and BlueSky)

[Dennis Donovan]

WaPo - (archived: https://archive.ph/xVy4Z ) The 40-something single dad shaping liberal media from his laptop (Acyn from X and BlueSky)

By Drew Harwell
April 19, 2025 6:00 a.m.



The man behind the most influential progressive account on social media starts his days at 6 a.m. in front of three TV and computer screens, scanning video feeds for the gaffes and confrontations that can turn into viral gold.

Acyn Torabi isn’t a Democratic star like former president Barack Obama or a liberal media giant like MSNBC. But the 40-something single dad, working from his home office in Los Angeles, has beaten them both in raw digital-attention capture, with posts seen roughly 700 million times in the last month.

Known online as @Acyn, Torabi is an industrialized viral-video machine, grabbing the most eye-catching moments from press conferences and TV news panels, packaging them within seconds into quick highlights, and pushing them to his million followers across X and Bluesky dozens of times a day.

The videos are not glitzy news-style packages, and Torabi is almost entirely unknown: Only a couple of photos of him exist on the internet, one of which shows him in a rumpled hoodie next to a pasted-in photo of his late cat.

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[Leghorn21]

1. Been a huge fan for YEARS!!

Such a treat to "meet" him!!

[dalton99a]

2. Democrats need more people like him.

[riversedge]

3. I love most of his tweets.

[highplainsdem]

4. Really appreciate his work and have posted a lot of it here.

[SheltieLover]

5. Kick

[WarGamer]

6. my favorite thing about @acyn

Is that unlike many of his fellow social media rebels... he doesn't post much nonsense, misinformation, catnip or utter bullshit.