Former President Barack Obama today warned that for all its benefits, the internet and social media is "turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses," and flooding the zone with disinformation that threatens our democracy.
We’ve witnessed a “profound change in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama said during a speech at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center. “I am amazed by the internet,” he said, “but our brains aren’t accustomed to taking in this much information this fast.”
Tech and social media companies have a financial incentive to keep people online and engaged, and conflict sells, Obama said. But Silicon Valley is not solely to blame; “In fact some of the most outrageous content on the web comes from traditional media,” he argued. But social media has accelerated the decline of local media outlets, allowing less reputable charlatans to fill the void, from Steve Bannon to Vladimir Putin.
Over time, we lose our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, Obama said. “Or maybe we just stop caring.”
Not helping the matter are members of Congress who “know better,” Obama said, pointing to GOP lies about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Obama is speaking out on this issue, in part, because of what he considers to be a personal “failure to fully appreciate [in 2016] just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of misinformation myself,” he said, a reference to the Birther conspiracy propagated by former President Donald Trump. “Putin didn’t do that. He didn’t have to. We did it to ourselves.”
And it can have deadly consequences, Obama said, pointing to those who died because they believed vaccine misinformation, as well as violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia that sprang from false information spread via Facebook. “People are dying because of misinformation,” he said.
Obama gave some broad recommendations on how to combat this issue, like updates to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; “a smart regulatory structure needs to be in place,” he said, while acknowledging that polarization in Congress could quickly stymie efforts there.
Absent regulatory action, the former president pushed for greater algorithm transparency at top tech firms, and encouraged people to break through their information bubbles. “As citizens, we have to take it upon ourselves to become better consumers of news,” he said. “We won’t get it right all at once, but that’s how democracy works.”
“Tools don’t control us, we control them,” Obama said. Right now, those tools have “some bugs, [but] we don’t have to just leave it like that.”
To that end, part of the work the former president is doing at the Obama Foundation is "working to empower and equip emerging leaders to tackle issues like the spread of disinformation."