Obama looks like he's trying to address disinformation. Imagine a former president doing something that might actually help the country.
There's more on what he thinks should be done as well for anyone interested.Quote:
AA former president of the United States has their pick of big problems to tackle once they leave office. Jimmy Carter worked on housing. Bill Clinton spent much of his time working to fight HIV and AIDS. Barack Obama, who has been out of office for six years, has so far led a fairly quiet post-presidency. But in recent weeks, he has begun drawing attention to an issue that advisers say has become increasingly important to him: disinformation, and the broader problems with our fractured information ecosystem.
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Typically when a politician wanders into this realm, I brace myself for the inch-deep thoughts and half-baked solutions that almost always follow. But Obama has clearly done the reading his talk today demonstrated an excellent command of the scope and significance of our problems online, while also owning up to the limits of an approach focused solely on removing disinformation to repair our democracy.
Notably, he preceded his critique by talking up the power and potential of a free and open internet something that seems to have fallen into disfavor among both Democrats and Republicans. And he acknowledged that social platforms helped to power his own rise.
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The problem, he said, is that "our new information ecosystem is turbocharging some of humanity's worst impulses." Some of that is intentional, he said, and some isn't. But ultimately it requires a society-level response. Otherwise, he said, America could be doomed to one day more closely resemble modern-day Russia, in which an autocrat rises to power, clamps down on information flows, and gradually undoes our democracy.
Obama acknowledged that social divisions predate Facebook and Twitter. And efforts to regulate speech will often run afoul of the First Amendment, for which he affirmed his strong support.
But something must be done, Obama said, citing perhaps the most grim statistic in the entire COVID-19 pandemic: around 1 in 5 Americans refuse to get vaccinated under the false belief it is likely to cause them harm. "People are dying because of misinformation," he said.
