Tim Pool

Timothy Daniel Pool (born March 9, 1986) is an American citizen journalist, YouTuber, and political commentator. He first became known for live streaming the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. He joined Vice Media and Fusion TV in 2013 and 2014, respectively, later working alone on YouTube and other platforms.
Early life.
According to Pool, he grew up in Chicago's South Side in a lower middle class family and left school at age 14.
Career.
Occupy.
After watching a viral video from Occupy Wall Street, Pool purchased a one-way bus ticket to New York. When Pool arrived in New York, he began livestreaming Occupy Wall Street protests with his cell phone. Pool used a live-chat stream to respond to questions from viewers while reporting Occupy Wall Street. Pool has also let his viewers direct him on where to shoot footage. He modified a toy remote-controlled Parrot AR.Drone for aerial surveillance and modified software for live streaming into a system called DroneStream. Pool's use of live streaming video and aerial drones during Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 led to an article in "The Guardian" querying whether such activities could take the form of counterproductive surveillance. In January 2012, he was physically accosted by a masked assailant.
Pool's video taken during the protests was instrumental evidence in the acquittal of photographer Alexander Arbuckle, who had been arrested by the NYPD. The video showed that the arresting officer lied under oath, though no charges were filed. While covering the NoNATO protests at the 2012 Chicago summit, Pool and four others were pulled over by a dozen Chicago police officers in unmarked vehicles. The group was removed from the vehicle at gunpoint, questioned, and detained for ten minutes. The reason given by police was that the vehicle the team had been in matched a description.
In the context of the Occupy movement, Pool's footage was aired on NBC and other mainstream networks. Pool was nominated as a "Time" 100 personality in March 2012 for his importance to the Occupy movement alongside David Graeber.
Vice and Fusion.
In 2013, Pool joined Vice Media, producing and hosting content and developing new methods of reporting. In 2013, he reported on the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul with Google Glass. In April 2013, he received a Shorty Award in the "Best Journalist in Social Media" category. From 2013 to 2014, as "Vice" correspondent, Pool covered and live streamed mass protests in Ukraine that led to collapse of the Yanukovych government.
In 2014, he joined Fusion TV as Director of Media innovation and Senior Correspondent.
Independent work.
In February 2017, Pool traveled to Sweden to investigate claims of "no-go zones" and problems with refugees in the country. He launched a crowdfunding effort to do so after U.S. President Donald Trump alluded to crimes related to immigration in Sweden. "InfoWars" writer Paul Joseph Watson offered to pay for travel costs and accommodation for any reporter "to stay in crime-ridden migrant suburbs of Malmö." Watson donated $2,000 to Pool's crowdfund to travel to Sweden. While in Sweden, Pool largely disputed that migrant suburbs of Malmö and Stockholm were crime ridden, saying that Chicago is vastly more violent.
However, Pool alleged that he had to be escorted by police out of Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb, due to purported threats to his safety. Swedish police have disputed Pool's claims, stating, "Our understanding is that he didn't receive an escort. However, he followed the police who left the place." The police stated that, "When Tim Pool took out a camera and started filming, a group of young people pulled their hoods up and covered their faces and shouted at him to stop filming. The officers then told Tim Pool that it was not wise to stay there in the middle of the square and keep filming."
Pool covered the 2016 Milwaukee riots. Pool said he would leave the area and stop reporting on these events, saying he thought it dangerous due to perceived escalating "racial tensions".
In 2014, Pool helped to launch Tagg.ly, a mobile app that watermarks photos. Pool said he was interested in this kind of application due to experiences where others used his photographs without attribution. In 2019, he co-founded the news company Subverse, which raised $1 million in 22 hours via regulation crowdfunding in 2019, surpassing the previous record on Wefunder. The service was later renamed SCNR. Pool partnered with Emily Molli and former Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro in the venture.
Podcaster Joe Rogan invited Pool onto his podcast, "The Joe Rogan Experience", following an interview with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. According to "The Atlantic" contributor Devin Gordon, both men demonstrated a limited understanding of Twitter, censorship, and abuse during the discussion. They criticized the banning of Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter, arguing that the provocateur had not truly encouraged his fans to harass "Ghostbusters" actress Leslie Jones. In early 2019, Rogan invited Pool and Dorsey, as well as Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, back on his podcast. Pool described cases where he asserted conservatives were unfairly suspended on Twitter. In particular, Pool brought up the banning of Alex Jones and argued that Twitter rules against misgendering transgender users is ideological. Gadde said that Twitter is a free speech platform on which punishments are based on evaluation of consistently-applied harassment guidelines.
In August 2020, Donald Trump liked a tweet of Pool's expressing sympathy and support for Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old boy from Antioch, Illinois, who had shot three protesters during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two. Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted a statement by Pool describing how the case of Rittenhouse had convinced Pool to vote for Trump. Trump Jr. also retweeted Pool noting that "the DOJ is dropping the hammer" in pursuing prosecution of 74 protesters in Portland.
Views.
In 2019 "Vice", Pool's former employer, described him in separate articles as "lefty" and "progressive" for his anti-corporate politics, as well as "right-wing". He has described himself as a social liberal who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. According to "Politico", Pool's "views on issues including social media bias and immigration often align with conservatives". According to "Al Jazeera", "Pool has amplified claims that conservative media endure persecution and bias at the hands of tech companies." Prior to Occupy Wall Street, Pool sometimes described himself as being anti-authoritarian or "pro-transparency", but did not think of himself as being very political. On August 24, 2020, Pool announced his support for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, writing that he felt alienated by changes he perceived in the modern left.
Pool tends to reject a left/right political framework for both self-description and in other contexts, instead preferring to divide the public into those who are "discerning" and "skeptical regarding legacy media" and those who are "undiscerning" and "uninitiated". He often discusses his impression that "the news is dying" and that it, as a result, tends to skew towards liberal and left-leaning audiences.