The Blocking of the President
What it means to not have a narcissistic bully dominating daily life, and the guardrails we have to reinforce to keep it from happening again.
“So I am not sure if I can even remember what Twitter was like before Donald Trump, but this month I got a taste of that life again.”
-Sam Sanders, host of NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute,” Friday January 15.
“What you said about it suddenly feels like it's a different Twitter …I totally feel the same way. It is sort of bizarre because there's been so much over the past … five years thinking about the campaign where … certainly for White House reporters, political reporters but also for tech reporters and, I think, for almost anybody who's at all conscious online - your day was so driven by what did Trump tweet last.”
-Tech reporter Shannon Bond, responding to Sanders.
Seventeen years ago, veteran journalist Christopher Lydon launched a site called “The Blogging of the President.” Its title was a reference to a series of best-selling books by Theodore White called “The Making of the President” which brought readers into a more intimate understanding of the people and forces that shaped the election of leaders starting with President John F. Kennedy; Lydon intended to show how the open platform of blogging, which was just flowering in 2003, could transform that process yet again in ways that could also demystify the process and make politics more accessible to ordinary people. Lydon recruited Matt Stoller, then a young blogger who had worked on the Draft Wesley Clark for president campaign, to write for the site, and they in turn drew many other early bloggers at the intersection of tech, media and politics.
This post about the clash between bloggers and traditional media bigfoots at the 2004 Democratic convention, written by NYU media critic Jay Rosen and saved for posterity by Jon Garfunkel, gives you the flavor of the site. Rosen takes as his jumping off an oped by Harvard’s Alex Jones, a longtime champion of traditional newspapers--the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is a totally different guy--for its “high church condescension” at the rise of the blogosphere. (For context, you need to recall that the 2004 Democratic convention was notable for just two things: the keynote speech by a rising star named Illinois state senator Barack Obama, and the credentialling of a couple dozen bloggers with press passes.)
Jones was upset at the breakdown of a standard he held dear, which was symbolized by the handing of press credentials to people who, I guess, hadn’t been credentialled the way it had been done for generations. He wrote:
“Political conventions have become festivals of faux harmony and candidate image-building, which makes them marvelous targets for blogging’s candor, intelligence and righteous wrath. However, bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar…. In these early days, blogging still has the charm of guileless transparency, which in the blogosphere means that everyone no matter how cranky or hysterical is presumed to be speaking his or her mind with sincerity. It is this air of conviction that makes bloggers such potent advocates. However, if history is any indicator, such earnestness will attract those who would exploit it, and they include some canny, inventive people.”
Rosen, who was a fan of the political blogosphere, hit back, accusing Jones of over-simplifying a “blogs vs serious journalism” dichotomy, when a more nuanced understanding suggested that many bloggers were as serious about the craft of careful reporting as their more traditional peers, or even more so. Now, if you look back at this argument from the perspective of say, 2010, you might say that Rosen was more in the right. It was high time the priests of journalism came down off their pedestals, and the rise of the blogosphere had led to many promising shifts in power: Political bloggers had unmasked Senate majority leader Trent Lott as a closet white supremacist, leading to his fall from power; they had proved that CBS anchor Dan Rather had unfairly tarred President Bush as having received preferential treatment during his military service, leading to Rather’s early retirement. Furthermore, the decline of the old media gatekeepers also enabled the rise of many new voices, including women and people of color long relegated to the sidelines of the mainstream news.
Ah, but fast forward to 2021. We have spent the last five years pummeled by a narcissistic bully whose mastery of the media, first in the entertainment arena and then in the political one, allowed him to build a digital megaphone, a “maga-phone” if you will, that until just a few days ago dominated daily life in America. Whether we were for him or against him, we were always talking about him. What Jones feared, that the national conversation would be centered on “vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar” came to pass. The guardrails were too flimsy, the incentives for profit too strong, and to our extreme bad luck, a canny operator of the worst order took advantage of every weakness in the American system to take the White House.
It is only in the extremely late blocking of the President by Twitter, Facebook and most of the other leading tech platforms that we can now see, and feel, what we’ve been through. (No, what they did was not censorship or even politically biased, it was, as Kara Swisher says better than I could, just the long-delayed application of their own rules to an out-of-control situation.)
How did we get here? We collectively underestimated how weak the guardrails preventing such a leader from rising to power had gotten. We collectively chose to feast on free content instead of paying for it, undermining the independent journalism needed to keep power in check. We let craven men like the leaders of CNN and CBS give Trump billions in free coverage, while crowing how good he was for their ratings and bottom lines. We let companies like Facebook and Google colonize our digital lives and sell our attention to the highest bidder. One of our two major political parties embraced its worst side and chose to fully weaponize lies that it had previously used to game the system (“voter fraud,” “urban unrest,” “socialism!”).
But, we in the democratic resistance to Trumpism also used the last four years to build some new muscles. And, despite the fears so many of us felt four years ago on this day, we blocked him. No, we didn’t stop his administration from doing all kinds of damage, but it also could have been so much worse. He could have been re-elected.
Tomorrow, I hope, is a day of celebration and relief. The Biden Administration is promising swift reversals on some of Trump’s most stupid and outrageous decisions, and it may be tempting to turn the page on the past. I hope we don’t do that. A true house-cleaning can’t happen unless we look in the dark corners. That work must continue. I’m looking forward to turning this newsletter in a more grounded direction, away from the grand-historical moment and back to the grind of making our democracy better. But it’s been a terrible time, my friends, and maybe tomorrow we’ll get to exhale again.
Life in Facebookistan
The Markup has built a group of nearly 2,000 “Citizen Browsers” who are letting it see what they see on their Facebook feeds, and the results are jolting, though not surprising. A week ago, Colin Lecher and Jon Keegan reported that Biden and Trump voters were seeing “radically different” coverage of the Capitol riot. And today, Leon Yin and Alfred Ng report that despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise under oath last October that the company had stopped recommending political or social issue groups to its users, the company has continued to do so. “Facebook pushed political groups most often to the Trump voters on our panel,” they report, and “some posts in those groups contained conspiracy theories, calls to violence against public officials, and discussions of logistics for attending the rally that preceded the Capitol riot.”
Odds and Ends
Last week, after some Bumble users reported using the dating app to lure MAGA supporters into sharing personally-incriminating information about their participating in the January 6 Capitol quasi-coup, the company temporarily suspended political filtering as an option, Ashley Collman reports for Business Insider. Bumble also claimed that it had already removed “any users” that had been confirmed as participants in the attack, and it has since turned political filtering back on.
Here’s more reporting on the tussle on Clubhouse between San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and some tech bros, from Michelle Tandler, a start-up founder who started the conversation on the chat site with the intention of exploring the “tech-odus” from the city and regrets how it spun out of control, and from tech industry chronicler Eric Newcomer, who says Boudin outfoxed the room. More up-and-coming politicos and organizers keep joining Clubhouse, which suggests it may become the next Twitter. I’m not sure that’s good thing, by the way, especially if the folks running the platform can’t figure out how to make it a genuinely manageable forum for curated conversation. (If you’d like an invite and you’re an iPhone user, I have a few—write me and I’ll try to get you one. Note—I’ll need your phone number too.)
A swath of public interest organizations led by Public Citizen have written an open letter to President-elect Biden urging him “to avoid appointing to key antitrust enforcement positions individuals who have served as lawyers, lobbyists, or consultants for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.”
Want to help John Scott-Railton of Toronto’s CitizenLab and the investigative journalists at Bellingcat decipher raw images from the Capitol riot? Here’s an imagery submission form.
Coding it Forward is looking for its summer round of Civic Digital Fellows.
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