Sam Biddle

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."

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. Biddle posted her public tweet to Gawker, and Sacco was later fired after considerable global media coverage of her tweet. In January 2014, Biddle said "It's satisfying to be able to say, 'O.K., let's make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.' And it did. I'd do it again." In June 2014, when Sacco found a job at Hot or Not, Biddle wrote: "How perfect! Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together." Sacco later defended herself, offering that she (a South African) had intended her tweet to "mimic—and mock what an actual racist, ignorant person would say of South Africa."

Sam Faulkner Biddle (born 1986) 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.