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WaPo: The 40-something single dad shaping liberal media from his laptop (Acyn from X and BlueSky) [View all]
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.
/snip
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.
/snip
6 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read