Sergey Brin remarked many years ago that staring down at a phone is emasculating.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
True: a recorded statement (video, transcript or reliable report) made some years before July 2022 in which Sergey Brin called looking down at or using a smartphone 'emasculating'. Mostly true: Brin used the word 'emasculating' (or 'kind of emasculating') about smartphone use, but the detail differs, e.g. he described rubbing or tapping a glass screen rather than staring down at it. Mixed: Brin made a closely similar criticism of phone use but did not call it emasculating, or the timing is well off. Mostly false: Brin said something only loosely related, such as general criticism of phones with no gendered or 'emasculating' framing. False: the record shows no such remark by Brin, or attributes it to someone else.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Google’s Sergey Brin finds smartphones “emasculating”—he may have a point. Quartz · 28 February 2013
“It’s kind of emasculating. Is this what you’re meant to do with your body?”
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E2 Sergey Brin Talks Google Glass At TED Conference - SlashGear SlashGear · 27 February 2013
“Is the future of connection just people walking around hunched up, looking down, rubbing a featureless piece of glass? It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?”
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E3 Why Google Glass? TED · 17 May 2013
“Onstage at TED2013, Brin calls for a new way of seeing our relationship with our mobile computers -- not hunched over a screen but meeting the world heads-up.”
Reasoning
SlashGear (E2), which is independent, reports that at TED in February 2013 Sergey Brin described people "hunched up, looking down, rubbing a featureless piece of glass" as "kind of emasculating", and Quartz (E1) also quotes him calling it "kind of emasculating". TED's own page (E3) confirms the TED2013 talk was about moving away from being hunched over a screen. The remark was made more than nine years before July 2022 and is about looking down at and using a smartphone, which meets the "true" criterion. "Kind of" is a slight hedge, but it does not change who said it, what it was about or when.
Cite this claim
Balaji Srinivasan, “Sergey Brin remarked many years ago that staring down at a phone is emasculating.” (said 4 July 2022). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_ef8ccce5992d, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_ef8ccce5992d
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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