Editing Sorry Everybody (section)

{{Short description|Political website}}
{{More citations needed|date=November 2024}}
'''Sorry Everybody''' was a website created after the [[U.S. presidential election, 2004|2004 United States presidential election]], which invited U.S. citizens to apologize to the world in advance for the actions of [[George W. Bush]] in [[George W. Bush's second term as President of the United States|the next four years]]. Its most prominent feature was the gallery, which contained images submitted by visitors holding various apology notes. The website became massively popular{{cn|date=December 2024}} in the aftermath of the [[presidential election]]s, leading some [[George W. Bush|Bush]] supporters to create spinoffs to express they were ''not'' sorry.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Bancroft |first=Colette |date=2004-11-20 |title=We're sorry, world ... or maybe not |url=https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2004/11/20/we-re-sorry-world-or-maybe-not/ |access-date=2024-11-05 |website=Tampa Bay Times |language=en}}</ref>

The website was created by James Zetlen, an American [[neuroscience]] student who was at the time in the third year of his [[undergraduate]] program at the [[University of Southern California]] in [[Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles]].<ref>{{Cite news |date=2004-11-15 |title=Election apology starts net feud |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4012621.stm |access-date=2024-11-05 |work=[[BBC]] |language=en-GB}}</ref> The first photo was taken by Zetlen of himself, in his home in Los Angeles on November 3, 2004, after [[John Kerry]] conceding in the [[2004 United States presidential election|2004 U.S. presidential election]]. Zetlen's photo inspired thousands more similar contributions from U.S. citizens, and he compiled a gallery of 8,000 of these photos on his website and published a 256-page book containing approximately 1,000 of them, entitled ''Sorry Everybody: An Apology to the World for the Re-election of George W. Bush''.

After [[Barack Obama]]'s victory in the [[2008 United States presidential election|2008 presidential election]], the site's title changed to "Hello Everybody," and Zetlen invited submissions again—this time of celebratory pictures of Americans reintroducing themselves to the world.