Nuked Jimmy Carter spent much of his time working to fight HIV and AIDS. Barack Obama has so far led a quiet post-presidency. In recent weeks, he has begun drawing attention to disinformation.
Trump had been the most prominent spreader of disinformation in the world. Once he lost access to the Oval Office and his Twitter account, dozens of false claims that the media would otherwise have spent all day running down disappeared from the headlines.
Republican politicians continue to repeat the big lie, using it as a pretext for stripping away voting rights. On occasion, this kind of disinformation seeps into the mainstream of the American press.
Julian zelizer: tech platforms have been all but indifferent to the quality of information they promote. He says a polarized citizenry that increasingly undermines the legitimacy of American democracy. zelizer: a decline in journalism jobs, particularly at local and regional publications, across the country.
Disinformation is too easily used as a scapegoat by Democrats seeking to gloss over some unsexy political problems.
Democrats need to read the correlation in the correct direction and try harder to appeal to their values, not write them off as too misinformed to be reached.
Obama says he was surprised at how vulnerable U.S. institutions are to those who would flood the airwaves with lies. He worries that those lies pose an existential threat to democracy.
‘it’s very difficult for us to get out of the reality that is constructed for us,’ he said.’it is difficult for me to see how we win the contest of ideas if in fact we are not able to agree on a baseline of facts that allow the marketplace of ideas to work’.
Obama paid a visit to Stanford University in Palo Alto, and delivered an hourlong keynote address at a conference titled’challenges to democracy in the digital realm’.
Obama’s talk shows an excellent command of the scope and significance of our problems online. He also owns up to the limits of an approach focused solely on removing disinformation to repair our democracy.
He talked up the power and potential of a free and open Internet. He acknowledged that social platforms helped to power his own rise.
I might never have been elected president if it had n’t been for – and I’m dating myself here – sites like MySpace, Meetup, and Facebook.’we’ve all witnessed the way activists use social platforms to register dissent, shine a light on injustice, and mobilize people on issues like climate change and racial justice,’ he said.
The problem is that Americans are turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses, he said. But ultimately it requires a society-level response. Otherwise, America could be doomed to one day more closely resemble modern-day Russia.
Obama acknowledged that social divisions predate Facebook and Twitter. Efforts to regulate speech will often run afoul of the first amendment.
Around 1 in 5 Americans refuse to get vaccinated under the false belief it is likely to cause them harm, Obama said.’people are dying because of misinformation,’ he said.
In part that’s because they have paid too little attention to the quality of the information that is traveling the farthest and the fastest. Lawmakers have not implemented meaningful regulations.
It’s possible to imagine all of the president’s most practical suggestions being implemented and still wonder how they could reverse a global slide into autocracy.
Platforms should describe their algorithmic recommendation systems in greater detail.’if a meat-packing company has a proprietary technique to keep our hot dogs fresh and clean, they do n’t have to reveal to the world what that technique is,’ he said.
They should offer academics access to their systems to enable more meaningful research. They should fund nonprofit newsrooms. They should give academics a chance to review them.
Obama talked briefly about reform of section 230, the law that exempts tech companies from legal liability in most cases for what their users post online.”I wish he had said more, particularly about how such reforms would pass first amendment scrutiny,”he said.
Obama also called on platform employees to advocate for changes like these – and to quit if none are made. The president also called for platform workers to advocates for change like these.
If Republicans do n’t have to win a majority of voters through persuasion or compromise, and can simply brute-force their way into office by curtailing voting rights. Why would Steve Bannon and his ilk ever temper the false claims that make that easier?.
When power is unaccountable, power is abused. I do n’t know how you solve that at the platform level.
Platforms could play a dramatic role in improving our information ecosystem. They could use the template of their covid response to promote high-quality information sources wherever they are showing news.
They could promote positive interactions and community building that cuts across political parties. They could form public-private partnerships to disseminate data about state-level actors who are conducting information operations here and around the world.
The next milestone on the product road map, the next set of quarterly earnings, is the next step. They could largely ignore the threats in favor of focusing on shorter-term goals.
The fate of Internet platforms in Russia once autocracy was complete. If they do, they would do well to remember that fate of the Internet platforms. They would remember how they would like to disappear.
Both platforms and Congress have been resistant to major changes for years now. It’s unclear what levers Obama will have to pull even if he were still president.
