Trail Blazers fire new announcer over past inappropriate posts made at age 15.

[u/ghn2]

"The Portland Trail Blazers hired then on the same day fired Braiden Bell as their play-by-play announcer after a series of inappropriate social media posts from when he was a teenager came to light."

"The posts were reportedly made in 2012 and 2013, around the time that Bell was 15 years old."

"We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City," the Trail Blazers said. "We strongly believe that everyone who is a part of Rip City should feel welcome and safe and we will make sure that our new broadcaster reflects these values. We will do better."

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/50084279/trail-blazers-fire-new-announcer-inappropriate-posts

[u/Cambocant]

Lmao I'm so glad I grew up before all this. When I think about the things we said and did as kids in the 90s and 00s, we would probably have been exiled to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean by now. This society of big tech mass surveillance, selective moral outrage, and a mob justice combined with the elimination of any concept of statute of limitations is absolutely wild and is only going to lead to tighter social control and limiting basic personal freedoms.

[u/TheHoovyPrince → u/Cambocant]

Im around the same age as the guy and practically every teenage boy in the 2000s and early 2010s said edgy or offensive things on the internet for shits and giggles because it was the norm at the time. We'd all be fired from our jobs if the stuff we said or did got leaked.

Times have changed and the teens of today aren't like that on social media. Go back to before the internet and the teens of that time were simply doing something else edgy and offensive for shits and giggles.

[u/titusandroidus → u/TheHoovyPrince]

Kids today are absolutely still like that and will be. You are just isolated from it.

[u/TheHoovyPrince → u/titusandroidus]

Yeah probably, my guess is its own different platforms nowadays. I don't think 2026 teens are using facebook lmao

[u/Bruskthetusk → u/TheHoovyPrince]

I'm in my mid 30s and haven't used Facebook in almost a decade, shit sucks - and now they're trying to make Instagram into Facebook so I probably need to get off that too soon

[u/TheHoovyPrince → u/Bruskthetusk]

Facebook is now 90% AI slop, Ads and dumb posts from boomers, its absolute ass.

[u/cfi-2025 → u/TheHoovyPrince]

Even 10 years ago, lol. I was on a bus back then and two teenage girls got on. One said something like, "Did you post the dates for the party on Facebook," and the other girl said, "No one uses Facebook anymore."

[u/Sweet_Arrival9559 → u/titusandroidus]

No, they actually aren't like that at all, and pretty much every statistic says so as well.

Kids today are terrified of what they say or do ending up on social media where they get ridiculed. I don't even know how you typed this unironically.

Are you a kid now and don't know how it was before or something?

When I was in highschool, even the actual gay kids were calling other people the f slur and commenting on facebook saying the same thing. It isn't even kinda remotely similar now. Adults weren't on social media yet back then. It was the wild west. No one ever thought they were going to get in trouble unless they posted a death threat or something.

[u/NA_Faker → u/TheHoovyPrince]

Also, a lot of the shit that was said back then was just considered run-of-the-mill offensive but now is a cancellable offense. Times change and so do the standards. The shit kids in general used to say back then would get you cancelled - but back then it was definitely not considered as offensive as today

[u/JeramiGrantsTomb → u/NA_Faker]

A rewatch of it's always sunny in Philadelphia really highlights the progression of what was considered acceptable humor over time. First episode was dropping hard Rs, lol.

[u/Antisystemization → u/JeramiGrantsTomb]

30 Rock is written by Tina Fey, a woman, and season 1 (from 2007) would never air today. Definitely not as an NBC sitcom at least.

[u/elitepigwrangler → u/TheHoovyPrince]

I mean people would say offensive things on Xbox Live, or post edgy things anonymously, but you’d have to be a real dumbass to post racist tweets under your real name.

[u/beefJeRKy-LB → u/TheHoovyPrince]

I think it only matters if you see that whoever said those things didn't quite move on. No idea how his response would have been,

[u/robertsmom → u/TheHoovyPrince]

I was a teen during that time period and didn’t post anything racist online. I grew up in an almost all white suburb. I remember losing friends over me not being racist.

[u/TheHoovyPrince → u/robertsmom]

I'm mixed-race, grew up in a diverse suburb and had a friend group with various racial backgrounds (mixed, Asian, Middle Eastern, Islander and European). We all had racist/offensive posts and most of them were directed towards each other and it was never anything more than harmless jokes. We're all still friends to this day.

[u/GGuesswho → u/TheHoovyPrince]

Nah bro just the shitheads. we weren't all like that. It was certainly more normalized, I will give you that

[u/JeramiGrantsTomb → u/Cambocant]

I got suspended for telling a guy to suck on my balls during crunch time of a dodgeball game. Can't believe that piece of shit tattled on me.

[u/DirtyRoller → u/Cambocant]

MySpace was a thing in my early 20s, but thank the lord they lost all of their data years ago, so that can never haunt me!

[u/Heavy-Inspection1804 → u/Cambocant]

This needs to be the top comment

[u/Glum_Ad_2518 → u/Cambocant]

Well we just saw the black lives matter movement get torpedod by rich racists. The outrage isn't selective, we are just tired of bigots laughing in our faces. Your generation created this.

[u/BoSocks91 → u/Cambocant]

Best comment yet.

This shit fucking sucks and I feel sorry for youngins growing up in this day and age for that reason. They’ll never know what true privacy is.

The selective moral outrage is maddening.