Pirate Wires engagement report

Best tweets

• Aug 28, 2026701x their median

  Enough of this renaming lakes and gulfs. We got to the moon first. The moon shall henceforth be known as the MOON OF AMERICA.

  34K2.0K1.8K323771K viewsView on X
• Aug 12, 202649x their median

  Nithya Raman is getting TORCHED by her own colleagues as she tries to lie about her unmitigated failure as chair of the Homelessness and Housing Committee. “You ran it like a lecture hall at a university, not a place of government”. Nithya is a scammer who ruined our city. https://t.co/kjNg5ZQ9Ra

  4.7K8714010112K viewsView on X
• Aug 4, 202678x their median

  As someone who now employs 20somethings, I often think about how nuts it was that my drug-addicted Vice bosses let me... edit a billion dollar website from my dorm room. I wrote about the insanity and lessons I learned from my Vice days for @PirateWires https://t.co/zFUHXnsarj

  3.9K19934321.6M viewsView on X
• Oct 25, 202641x their median

  We finally get flying cars, and somehow that's fascist too. Imagine being so poisoned by the internet that you can’t enjoy anything anymore. https://t.co/PnXcdR4krE

  1.8K24112413310K viewsView on X
• Aug 31, 202641x their median

  In less than a decade, the internet went from free and open to one of the most heavily moderated spaces in public life. Beginning in 2015, every major platform created strict, but extremely vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation and censorship apparatus. NGOs, the US government, and foreign actors (notably, the EU) helped. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on speech policing, which often went by the Orwellian term “trust and safety.” The scale of censorship has no precedent. Tens of millions of accounts were suppressed or banned. Billions of posts were removed. A professional historian could spend their entire career chronicling it. McCarthyism is taught in schools, and online censorship of the 2010s is orders of magnitude larger than McCarthyism ever was. Here, a full history chronicling exactly how major platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook) silenced dissident speech, from @arctotherium42 👇

  1.7K4363637110K viewsView on X
• Sep 21, 202637x their median

  California’s Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, as head of HHS, once led the department responsible for a child-migrant facility costing $92,608 per cot — and it may have sent kids to trafficking rings. The facility cost taxpayers $782 million. Roughly 8,450 unaccompanied migrant children passed through in under a year. Its job was to care for kids and place them with safe “sponsors” (family members or other relatives). According to interviews obtained by Pirate Wires, the facility prioritized speed over safety. A case manager said sponsors submitted obviously fake IDs, and ID checks were “routinely ignored.” Another worker allegedly raised alarm bells about ~200 migrant kids who’d gone to a single location; when this worker contacted a child trafficking hotline, they were promptly fired. A separate investigation by Chuck Grassley found that HHS, under Becerra’s watch, sent kids home with sponsors tied to MS-13. And a 2023 New York Times investigation found that some kids were released to trafficking rings, where they ended up cleaning slaughterhouses, suffering chemical burns, or performing hard labor prohibited for minors (in some cases, children died). Becerra is leading in the polls. He brands himself the “safe choice” given his 30-plus years in government… and claims to “protect” “marginalized communities.” …But his record tells a very different story. Our full investigation, via @nicolewizman1 👇

  1.3K5823471216K viewsView on X
• Aug 4, 202632x their median

  In the 2010s, VICE was peak hipster American culture. The brand was known for loudly breaking taboos. Its cofounder, Gavin McInnes, would go on to found the Proud Boys and get banned from basically every social media platform for “hate speech.” By the mid-2010s, what began as an alt magazine in Montreal had landed an HBO show and convinced Rupert Murdoch and Disney to invest. It was, at one point, worth almost $6 billion. A decade later, it was bankrupt. @BCC_Mitchell, the youngest employee at Vice in 2012, takes us inside their rise and fall — from drug-fueled editorial meetings, to the CEO throwing $1m in cash at staff during a holiday party, to the team starting to chase ‘woke’ for clicks… …to, eventually, the CEO himself abandoning what made the company famous in the first place. “Vice was a cult,” Mitchell writes. “It was also the best business school on Earth.” Below, the deepest insider profile yet of a 2010s media giant 👇

  1.5K11544691.2M viewsView on X
• Oct 4, 202629x their median

  When did modern feminism go from fighting for women’s equality to absolving them of any and all responsibility? https://t.co/YwTlIR4P0t

  1.3K15252952K viewsView on X
• Sep 8, 202622x their median

  When the FCC approved Starlink’s second-gen satellites, environmental groups took the agency to court, alleging “diminishment in the enjoyment of the dark sky.” When Starlink wanted to lower its satellites, a competitor made bogus claims about space debris. No more. Now, the FCC is ending this kind of NIMBYism by eliminating its environmental reviews for space tech. Full story from @JonasYDu 👇

  9981224022105K viewsView on X
• Oct 13, 202616x their median

  read it, share it, save the city: a san francisco voter guide for people who aren't insane https://t.co/HCBd9fcYSf

  759733914132K viewsView on X

Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

Keep going