Publicity politicians explored new media strategies. Rather than through traditional secret methods of managing the press, politicians now personally sought the limelight. A ‘will to publicity’ defined their politics: they published their political communications – seeking political legitimacy by showing the public how they handled political crises – and made political speeches that the press amplified internationally. A fiery speech that animated a local audience, however, risked upsetting a distant audience of newspaper readers the next day. Consequently, political aides intervened in speeches’ publication. Since politicians and the press considered speeches important political acts, they became crucial to exercising power in a mass mediated environment. Mediated speeches enabled politicians to connect with the people directly, bypassing parliament and bureaucracy. Developments in photography and film further enabled politicians to put their person at the centre of public attention. Sketches and cartoons of politicians had a longer history, but they could now be printed and distributed faster and on an industrial scale.

So far, we have heard a lot about how private actors are trying to regulate the internet. Governments across the world have also been very active in trying to get internet companies to regulate what information their citizens can access and share online. The decentralized, resilient design of the internet makes government censorship much more difficult than in the mass media era, where it was much simpler to embed controls within the operations of a small number of major newspaper publishers and television and radio networks. Governments are adapting, though, and quickly becoming much more sophisticated in how they monitor and control the flow of information online.

In August 2017, several hundred white nationalists marched on the small university town of Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally turned tragic when one of the protesters rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The Washington Post characterized the protesters as “a meticulously organized, well-coordinated and heavily armed company of white nationalists.”1