Acyn Torabi: the 40-something single dad shaping liberal media from his laptop
Drew Harwell at WaPo:
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. But his videos are endlessly cited and shared, creating a first visual draft of history widely watched by journalists, news junkies and political campaigns. “I’m just one clip after another, hitting the narratives, going, going, going,” Torabi said in an interview. Torabi’s rise offers a glimpse of a new generation of online journalism, in which frenetic, fast-cut video posts fuel the country’s political debates. Stephen Coleman, a professor of political communication at the University of Leeds, said the videos function less like traditional news and more like entertainment or sports, because they give people something to socialize over in a short, visually compelling way.
“It’s information you come across inadvertently, raw stimuli you see alongside celebrities and recipes,” he said. “People want drama … the big moments, the things they can talk about the next day.” The videos have multiplied amid social media’s rapid colonization of the press, with 1 in 5 Americans — including one-third of those under 30 — telling the Pew Research Center last year that they get their news from influencers who specialize in current events. But they have also fueled criticism that they sometimes cut out context to score political points. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, on Wednesday said that children with autism will never hold a job or go on a date, Torabi’s excerpt from the remarks helped the controversy grow at viral speed — even as Health and Human Services officials argued that Kennedy had been referring only to “those that are severely affected.” Torabi’s clip, posted on X within four minutes, has been seen 50 million times. The risk from videos like these, Coleman said, is that they’re never as impartial as they might seem. But they offer a benefit, too, in helping get people engaged in the squabbles and mechanics of civic life. “I wouldn’t want to be too sniffy about it,” he said. “It’s not a choice between this and going to the library. It’s a choice between this and nothing.” When he first started clipping, Torabi had no background in journalism; he was just a software developer who spent a lot of time on Twitter. He’d grown up in California but didn’t see himself as all that political: When he first registered to vote, at a gas station, he chose Republican — to match Alex P. Keaton, from the sitcom “Family Ties.” (He’s since changed to Democrat.)
Then in 2019, he tweeted a video of a confused Rudy Giuliani on Fox News that exploded across the internet. It was a rush — so he began spending his free time finding and cutting more clips, chronicling the daily twists of the news cycle, from President Donald Trump’s impeachments to his pandemic response. He did everything himself unpaid until a software company in Texas called SnapStream — whose multichannel video feeds are used by marketing companies and newsrooms, including The Washington Post, to track and dissect live TV — started paying him for every customer he referred to the company through his viral posts. Both Torabi and the company declined to say how much he made.
In 2023, the left-wing media network MeidasTouch hired Torabi to contribute to its collection of anti-Trump videos, newsletters and social media posts. Researchers there now help him cover some of the wayward podcasters and influencers of the conservative media universe.
[...] Torabi’s devotion has paid off: The liberal Center for American Progress’s database tracking roughly 2,000 of the top political groups and influencers across the internet shows that Torabi’s posts have been seen hundreds of millions more times in the last 30 days than news giants like MSNBC and CNN. Ranked by views, or “total impressions,” he is the only nonconservative voice in the top 10, probably because his posts — and the ways they can help win political arguments — have bipartisan appeal. Clips from Torabi and his biggest clipping competitor, Aaron Rupar, have faced perennial criticism from the right and left over allegations they mislead viewers. When Torabi last year posted a 17-second clip in which Trump said, “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath,” conservatives argued he had deceptively left out that Trump had been talking about the auto industry.
[...] It’s also led to some competitive tension with Rupar, a 41-year-old clipper in Minnesota with nearly 1 million X followers, who unlike Torabi started in journalism at local news outlets before gaining online fame for his viral videos covering all things Trump. “The daily mayhem” of Trump’s first presidential term, Rupar said, yielded “so many good clips.” Rupar uses his viral clips to bring in new customers to his newsletter, Public Notice, which has more than 267,000 subscribers, and he and Torabi often race to see who can get a newsworthy moment online first. “Sometimes I’ll have a clip up before him, and his will take off,” Rupar said. “It’s one of the mysteries of life.” Torabi’s ubiquity on X has been especially noticeable given how much the platform has been reshaped under Elon Musk’s ownership into a central hub for conservative memes and conversation, said Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist.
The Washington Post does a story on Acyn Torabi, the man behind clipping live news onto social media, similar to what Aaron Rupar does.
