Pool grew up with three siblings in Chicago's South Side in a lower-middle-class family. He left school at age 14.
Career
In the context of the Occupy movement, Pool's footage has been aired on NBC and other mainstream networks. 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. 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 was nominated as a Time 100 personality in March 2012. While covering the NoNATO protests at the 2012 Chicago summit, Pool, along with four others, was pulled over by a dozen Chicago police officers in unmarked vehicles. The group was removed from the vehicle at gunpoint, questioned and briefly detained. The reason given by police was that the vehicle the team had been in matched a description. The group was released after 10 minutes. In 2013, Pool joined Vice Media producing and hosting content as well as developing new methods of reporting. In 2013, he also 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. In 2014, he joined Fusion TV as Director of Media innovation and Senior Correspondent. In the end of 2013 as Vice correspondent Pool covered and live streamedmass protests in Ukraine which led to collapse of Yanukovych government. In February 2017, Pool traveled to Sweden to investigate right-wing claims of "no-go zones" and problems with refugees in the country. He launched a crowdfunding effort to do so after 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 is a co-founder of Tagg.ly, a mobile application for watermarking photos and videos in order to allow copyrights to be withheld by users. Tim Pool also co-founded the news company Subverse, which raised $1 million in 22 hours via regulation crowdfunding in 2019, surpassing the previous record on Wefunder.
Views
Pool's political commentary since the 2016 United States presidential election has been variously described as left-wing and 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."
