Thomas Germain
@thomasgermain
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Tech correspondent for the @BBC covering AI, privacy, and life under the algorithms. Tell me about the weird thing you saw on the internet. ⬇️ contact info ⬇️
Brooklyn, NY
Joined February 2009
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TIL the idea the coffee dehydrates you is based on a study from 1928 that looked at 3 people
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Bad news: your car is a spy.
All 25 major car brands just flunked a privacy and security test by Mozilla. You’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal data as sensitive as race, weight, and sexual activity.
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Scoop: Musk says Apple "mostly stopped" advertising on Twitter. On the same day, Apple spent over $84,000 on Twitter ads.
In fact, Apple's Twitter ad spend is up in November. They spent over a million dollars this month alone.
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Congratulations to this robot that tweets words the first time they're printed in the New York Times. Today it got to tweet its own name
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The FTC fined GoodRx today based on a story I broke at
@ConsumerReports
. We caught GoodRx secretly sending your prescription data to Facebook and Google. Now, the FTC says that’s illegal.
For the first time, we may have real health privacy the US.
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Elon Musk endorsed a tweet said students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities have low IQs, approaching “borderline intellectual impairment.”
It's a pattern now. In November, Musk boosted a tweet that said Jews push “hatred against whites”
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@Ben_7_Ben
@oneunderscore__
If you can find two other people with the same experience we might be on to something
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Ever see an ad on a billboard that seemed a little too specific to your interests? It's no coincidence. By tracking your phone, some companies are showing targeted ads in public, the same way ads are tailored to you online. My latest for
@ConsumerReports
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Excited to say this is my first day at the
@BBC
. I’ll be on the features team covering tech and all things innovation. Send me your story ideas!
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SCOOP: CNET is erasing thousands of older articles because it thinks it will help with Google Search results. Some SEO experts say it makes sense, but a Google representative says "That's not a thing!"
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Just had a company offer me an n95 mask in exchange for product coverage.
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My last
@ConsumerReports
story, and stop me if you heard this one before: TikTok tracks you when you're not on TikTok. Websites like Planned Parenthood, the Mayo Clinic, and the Girl Scouts are using pixels to send TikTok identifiable information about you
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I really can’t believe this. You now cannot give Twitter your advertising money unless your pay for Twitter Blue or spend $1000 a month. Impossible to imagine this won’t turn even more advertisers away
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Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape everything you post online to build its AI. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now.
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scoop: Congress makes it very difficult to dig up their investment portfolios. We got the details anyway
Politicians Who Voted to Ban TikTok May Own as Much as $126 Million in Tech Stocks
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GoodRx is one of the only ways to save money on prescription drugs. But there's another bargain you're signing up for when you use the app: the company sends data about your prescriptions to the tech industry. My latest for
@ConsumerReports
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New: Apple says it’s analytics data is anonymous, but tests show it includes an ID number tied to your name, email, and phone number
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No idea whether Apple hates free speech, but they don't hate Twitter ads. Data from
@Pathmatics
shows Apple's ad spend dropped a bit from their monthly average over the last year, but it's far from the pause we've seen from other major advertisers.
Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?
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New: This summer the College Board really wants to talk to kids. It's texting their phones, emailing at school & pushing a lottery on social media. The theme: join the College Board site and start planning your future
That’s when the tracking starts. 1/
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Every once in awhile you write an extremely controversial article, like this one that provides simple instructions that thousands of people were asking for. The amount of hate mail you get for mentioning that misinformation exists is absolutely wild
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Have you noticed that you’re way more angry at your phone and computer these days? The internet is in absolute shambles, and it’s a recent change. All the free money dried up. Now the tech companies are sacrificing and sabotaging your experience to make up for it
The internet feels increasingly broken. News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled. Web browsing feels horrible now.
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Personal scoop: after four glorious years, this marks my last week at Consumer Reports. On Monday I start as a reporter at
@Gizmodo
. I'll be covering privacy, ad tech, algorithms, and using the word "data" in a lot of different sentences.
Send me your tips!
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The Reddit controversy could ruin the site forever. After a leaked memo showed the CEO belittling the protest, mods at some of the most popular subreddits are threatening to extend their blackouts forever. Huge subs like r/funny & r/music could be finished
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Students knew online proctoring software was creepy. The security issues came as a surprise
A
@ConsumerReports
investigation finds
@Proctortrack
may have put student data at risk by exposing videos of students in their bedrooms, copies of IDs & more
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People don’t have data, we’re not walking around with json files. Companies create data *about* us. “Your data” implies some level of control, it’s a fantasy
“Your data” as a concept is specious and intellectually lazy, and it allows the concept of privacy to be weaponized / exploited.
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@ConsumerReports
There's a huge misconception about health privacy in the US. People think HIPAA applies to all health data, but it doesn't. HIPAA only covers doctors, health care providers, insurance companies, and businesses that work with them directly
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Catch me on CNN talking cookies, privacy, and the future of the web 🍪
Google disables cookies for 30M Chrome users
"What we're talking about is one of the biggest changes - not just in the history of the internet - but the entire business model of the tech industry."
@thomasgermain
tells
@Boris_Sanchez
what this could mean for consumer privacy
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Elon Musk says he loves free speech. His track record says different.
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Lawsuit filed by a six-year-old boy and a best-selling author accuses Google of "stealing everything ever shared on the internet." Comes a week after I caught a Google privacy policy update that says any public data is fair game for its AI scraping machine
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Scoop: Elon Musk once complained about the Apple App Store’s “30% tax on the internet.” At Tesla, he isn’t paying, violating iPhone app policy and dodging millions in fees. For some reason, Apple’s letting him get away with it
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Some dating app users say manipulative algorithms suppress the good matches. I talked to dating coaches, algorithm experts, and the leader of a “dating app hacker” group to find the truth. But when tech companies runs romance, you'll never know for sure.
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Scoop: Apple’s Private Relay feature hides your IP address. Criminals are exploiting it in a $65 million advertising fraud scheme, passing off robots as real Apple users
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That left a gaping hole in health care protections that thousands of business waltzed through for decades. Until now, a company like GoodRx could do whatever it wanted with your health information, even if the exact same data would be protected in the hands of a doctor
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Isn’t Amazon Prime Day just… one gigantic fraud? Most “sales” are marked down from imaginary inflated prices. Often you’re not getting a deal of any kind. Seems illegal to tell customers they’re getting a 30% discount when that’s a bald faced lie
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Amplifying some safety tips here. The government tracks protestors. It's hard to stop it, but this can help.
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I’m at the metaverse wedding, I’m at the Taco Bell, I’m at the combination metaverse wedding and Taco Bell
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Visited the Acics website and then immediately got an ad for a lawsuit about how the Acics website violated my privacy. So the law firm is using data collected from the Acics to target me about Acics data collection
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In the 80s an antitrust case helped Microsoft beat IBM. In the 90s, a Microsoft antitrust case helped Apple, Google, and Facebook beat Microsoft. Now it's Google's turn. Antitrust investigations make it harder to fend of competition. Google is in trouble
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Google is killing the cookie, and it could transform the digital economy. At lot of people aren't happy about, but Google thinks they should be. I talked to Google's
@vkw
, who gave me for an unprecedented look at the project they call "Privacy Sandbox"
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Elon Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist." It's more and more clear that you should understand the words "free speech" to mean that the world's most hateful people can say whatever they want and everyone else can't.
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The FTC is taking an unprecedented move. GoodRx doesn't just have to pay a measly $1.5 million fine, they also agreed to sharing data with ad tech companies.
An FTC official said this sends a clear message that using health data for ads may be against the law
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This is monumental. For those who don't live in New York, you generally have to pay a "broker's fee" of about 1 month's rent for the privilege of moving into an apartment, even if the broker didn't do anything to help you find the place.
"Landlords must now pay the broker fees for real estate agents they hire to represent their interests, according to new guidance from the (state.)
This is a reversal from the tenant-pays system that is the norm in rental transactions in New York City."
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This is a bombshell, but it won't get the attention it deserves because most people haven't heard of Oracle or BlueKai.
It can be hard to point to evidence that web tracking is harmful, but here it is plain as day. Collecting the info in the first place IS the harm
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Tomorrow, the world’s most famous celebrities will gather to clap at each other in a contest to determine—once and for all—which movie has the highest marketing budget. There’s no law forcing you watch this excruciating three-hour self-congratulation fest
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My first story for the
@BBC
, the ghosts of India’s TikTok could be a vision of America’s future
The US wouldn’t be the first to ban the app. As 170M users swipe through videos in limbo, India offers a preview: people adapt, but the culture is lost forever
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A new study says an unorthodox group of 7 users controls the Israel-Hamas news on Twitter, generating 10 times more views than leading accounts like the NYT and CNN with 100 times more followers. Gizmodo sat down with two of them. Link below ⬇️
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Today we're launching the
@ConsumerReports
7-Day Privacy Challenge, a week long email series to help you take control of your digital life. I'll send you short daily activities, and you'll round out the week better protected and more informed.
Sign up!
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This is the smallest hill I will ever die on. When Meta or Google say “you control your data” or offers to give you a copy, it’s a lie. You’ll never see everything these companies have learned from decades of spying on
So, FB calculates an internal classifier that predicts 'ideology' / political leaning for 95% of US users.
Is this accessible under any US state privacy law, e.g. in California? Do they calculate similar scores for users in other regions e.g. in the EU?
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The fact that Google doesn’t have a way to put the kibosh on SEO spam is one of the most alarming things in tech rn
If you add "reddit" to the end of search terms so that you can find posts by a real person, I have bad news: AI is beginning to poison Reddit in an effort to game Google results
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If you haven’t been following, it’s assumed “Adrian Dittman” is Elon Musk’s not so secret alter ego.
“Adrian” just told Nick Fuentes to be subtle about his open support for Hitler
A man calling himself “Andrew Dittmann” who sounds exactly like Elon Musk and identifies as being “on the spectrum”—as Elon does—participates in Nick Fuentes’ Space and basically tells him not to go full Kanye on the platform:
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Most TVs collect data about *everything* you watch and send it who knows where. Manufactures say that's ok because privacy controls let you turn the snooping off. We did a study about how hard those settings are to use—the answer (won't) surprise you
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Tucker Carlson's hosting his next show on Twitter, whatever that means. Musk says they don't have a contract, but they're going to share ad revenue. Guess what that means for big brands:
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@LizWofford16
@Pognarchism
Sorry but no, that won’t help. That’s just the data plan for *you.* Your car is connected to the internet whether or not you’re paying, the only question is whether you’re allowed to use the features
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2022 was a turning point for privacy and the data economy. Over the next year, we’ll get a picture of what the new data world order will look like. Here’s a hint: way, way more ads. These are my privacy predictions
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At the very least, you can't do it without clear, informed consent. And the FTC says you can't use dark patterns to trick people into saying yes
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New: Google's AI search results will happily justify slavery, explain the "benefits of genocide," and give step-by-step cooking tips for Amanita ocreata, a poisonous mushroom known as the angel of death.
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The only ethical use of AI is to make beautiful hotdogs
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You are powerful, a camera is an important tool, and you have the right to record in public.
These tips can you produce a more effective video of police misconduct or any other activity, and help you stay safe while you do it.
@ConsumerReports
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@GoodRx
is STILL sending data to Google and the ad industry. But this morning, the company told me you don’t have to worry about it, because they’re being careful and all the tracking is in line with their “compliance obligations”
@thomasgermain
@ConsumerReports
And yet the GoodRx Android app is currently blasting hundreds of tracking requests to Branch Metrics, AppsFlyer and more after searching for a few prescription drugs. (Stopped by
@DuckDuckGo
App Tracking Protection)
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Anyone else noticing a pattern here? Last week Elon made an exception for child sexual abuse photos and now Kanye gets a third chance for Nazism. The only thing you can’t do on Twitter, it seems, is criticize Elon
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After sitting through FIVE HOURS of TikTok testimony, I think the writing is on the wall. Congress is united, and the president is on board. It didn't seem possible, but it looks like TikTok is going to get banned or sold in the near future
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Went on CNN to talk about the Blue Check apocalypse last night
#Twitter
got swamped with imposters &
#disinformation
Thursday when it removed the
#BlueCheckMark
from all
#Verified
accounts that refuse to pay for the privilege.
@thomasgermain
tells me what impact this will have on trust & what the
#BlockTheBlue
trend is all about:
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The crazy part isn't that Meta created an "oversight board" that doesn't have any oversight authority. It's that journalists spent SO much time and effort talking about it when we all knew it was meaningless
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Turns out AI can do everything I can: publish boring articles full of errors
Guess what started getting published on our sites today??
AI-generated lists!! They’re ass! And incorrect!!
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Privacy. That's iPhone?
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Chrome added a button that changed your default browser with one click. Then Microsoft updated Windows. For a while, the Windows settings page popped up every single time some users opened Chrome, no matter what they did.
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It is absolute insanity that people think TikTok partnering with Oracle, a data broker, is going to solve privacy concerns
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@LizWofford16
@Pognarchism
“Your data” does not mean things you input. Your car is FULL of sensors of various different kinds. They know what you listen to on the radio, when your seatbelt is on, GPS tracks your movements. Everything can be connected to a computer
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@martecx_
Yes, there was a decrease year over year. Nov 22 is down ~28% from Nov 21. That said, there are a lot of reasons that could be the case, from shifting priorities to the economy. Regardless it's nothing like what Musk said
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Hard to overstate what a big deal this is. It's not just news sites either, the wars between the tech companies are going to destroy the web
The new version of Safari will let users "erase" parts of web pages (like ads) that they don't like. This will have the greatest impact on sites with heavy repeat readership - probably News sites hit worst of all. Sorry journalism, Apple DGAF about you.
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My second to last story for
@ConsumerReports
, we looked at those cookie consent popups. You know the ones asking to track you? Shocker: they don't work.
During the investigation, I named a robot after myself and I convinced Instagram I have colitis
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The Kids Online “Safety” Act is about attacking the transgender community
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This is a big deal. Sounds like Spotify is dumping Apple’s in-app payment system. The tech industry is declaring war on the App Store Tax
wow, this is a gutsy move. i guess their testing showed <30% churn.
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Also wild, but unsurprising, it's such standard practice to fill your website with trackers that a couple of the organizations we reached out to honestly seemed like they didn't realize their websites were sending data to TikTok
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Scoop: A Lawsuit against Talkspace says the company lies about the availability of therapists, pairing you with providers who aren't appropriate. Then it allegedly tricks you into agreeing to auto-payments, charging even when there's no therapist to see
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We got our hands on the full AI-generated script from the Willy Wonka disaster. Give it a read it's... wild
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New study details how apps, including Grindr, OkCupid, Tinder, and the period-tracking apps Clue and MyDays, send data like sexual preferences, religious beliefs, and gps info straight from your to phone to data brokers
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I have terrible news
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Blocking TikTok may address some very specific hypothetical concerns, but if you’re worried about privacy, it would be like throwing a rock into the Mississippi river and hoping it stops the flow of water.
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We just published a new piece about changes GoodRx made after our original investigation. The company stopped some of the practices we uncovered and rolled out new privacy controls for users
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Twitter's traffic is plummeting as Threads hits 100M downloads. Yesterday, Musk called Zuckerberg a cuck and called for a "literal dick-measuring contest." Apparently, Twitter is also blocking the word "threads" from trending. Zuck's response: lol
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And this is just the beginning. TikTok's ad businesses grew about 170% last year, and another 180% this year. TikTok dominated social media, now they're building an advertising empire. As the ad revenue grows the tracking will grow with it
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Had a great time talking to
@jolingkent
. This Apple lawsuit is one of the biggest moments in the last 20 years of tech
The Department of Justice unveiled a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging the tech giant of maintaining a smartphone monopoly and boxing out its smaller competitors. Apple called the lawsuit "wrong on the facts and the law.”
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Interested in whether or not the FTC is going to fine your company millions of dollars for privacy violations? Then you need to read this interview with the FTC’s
@saalevine
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Not sure what stage of capitalism this is but we’re now at the “denying slave labor through TikTok influencer campaign” level
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So Twitter banned the Krassenstein brothers in 2019. Then Elon took over and unbanned them, and now he's paying them $25k. I have to say, uuuh, lol
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Smh, I’m so tired of seeing this kind of thing. Turtles are cold-blooded critters who need a fairly constant temperature in order to thrive. If you can’t provide a healthy enclosure with an appropriate heat lamp, you aren’t ready to be a pet owner 😡
Mitch McConnell inexplicably freezes during press conference, is quickly escorted away
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I’ve been living with a lot of depression and anxiety, but today I went to the gym and meditated and now I’m going to a sauna and god damn it I will win
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