Occupation Journalist Alma mater Johns Hopkins University | Parents Wayne Biddle | |
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Full Name Sam Faulkner Biddle Employer The Intercept
Gawker Media (formerly) Residence Williamsburg, New York City, New York, United States Profiles | ||
Sam Faulkner Biddle 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.
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Education
Sam Biddle attended college at Johns Hopkins, where he was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity and majored in philosophy.
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. 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."
Controversy
Biddle's articles have often been controversial, at times criticizing and making fun of technology companies and affluent people in the San Francisco Bay Area. New York Magazine has referred to Biddle as "perhaps the most hated journalist in the Bay Area", while an article in PandoDaily attacked him as a "grotesque hypocrite".
Gamergate
Biddle and Gawker have been targets of the Gamergate controversy, an Internet campaign related to feminism and ethics in video games media. In response to a tweet by Biddle saying "Bring Back Bullying", 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.
Justine Sacco incident
Biddle played an important role in the online shaming of Justine Sacco in December 2013 after Sacco had tweeted "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m white!" to her 173 twitter followers. Sacco (a South African) had intended her tweet to "mimic—and mock what an actual racist, ignorant person would say of South Africa." Biddle saw the tweet at face value and posted it to Gwaker where it went viral and promoted the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet.
Sacco lost her job and experienced significant social isolation, for a time becoming one of the most hated people on twitter.
Biddle later apologised for his role in the online shaming and admitted that he did it so as to increase Internet traffic to his blog.