Ancestors

Written by Josh Braun on 2025-01-16 at 20:40

Something I often think about in relation to online media and politics is that during the 2008 election it was early enough, in social media years, that news sites were still hosting a good deal of the public conversation online via their respective comment threads. 1/4

[#]uspol #journalism

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Written by Josh Braun on 2025-01-16 at 20:41

CBS News, at the time, had just invested an immense amount of money and time into developing and launching its own bespoke on-site commenting system, only to immediately turn it off across many of their story pages because they could not control the "volume and persistence" of racist commentary that their stories on Barack Obama were attracting. 2/4

https://archive.nytimes.com/thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/muzzling-all-to-hush-a-few/

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Toot

Written by Josh Braun on 2025-01-16 at 20:41

Fast forward a few years to the 2016 election and media commentators acted shocked about the amount of racist commentary that was showing up on Twitter and Facebook in relation to politics. I think it likely that the same grotesque sentiments were common in both elections, but in 2008 it was in CBS's business interests to hide these comments, while in 2016 it was in Facebook's business interests to let them spiral. 3/4

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Descendants

Written by Josh Braun on 2025-01-16 at 20:41

And now, in 2024/2025, it's apparently in their interest to…well, whatever this is. 4/4

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2025-01-07/zuckerberg-bezos-brin-the-tech-bros-cozying-up-to-trump

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