The phrase 'threat to democracy' in this context at this time ought to be a red flag that someone's trying to pull a fast one. Remember when people only wanted to add 'hate speech' to the exception list (things that 'free speech' supposedly 'never meant')? Now it's expanded to hate speech <i>and</i> 'false or misleading information'. And I'm seeing this messaging pretty frequently in a variety of public fora.<p>Obama is just changing his tune with the wind.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/mi5da2AhDCY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/mi5da2AhDCY</a><p>Where are all the politicians raising the alarm about plutocracy as a threat to democracy? (I know there are a few who do, at least nominally.)
> One “of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama told an audience in a keynote speech at a symposium at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.<p>This is some pretty impressive Newspeak.<p>The reason Democracy is “weakening” is because people have been lied to by elected representatives in both parties as well as institutions and traditional media outlets for decades.<p>Social media has finally given the public a chance to learn about a lot of things that would have simply been covered up or ignored otherwise.<p>What it sounds like Obama is really pushing for here is government/totalitarian control over what speech should be permitted, the exact opposite of free speech.<p>A healthy representative Democracy requires information flows that are complete so the public actually knows what their elected representatives are doing. Without this, it creates a situation of mistrust and people do not have the relevant information they need when they go to the polls to vote for their representatives.<p>Sunlight is the best disinfectant as they say.<p>This is the real fear that most of these people have when it comes to Musk buying Twitter. They are afraid he will remove censorship controls already in place on the platform.
It's sad to realize how quick a substantial number of people are to discard what are ostensibly core principles when they conflict with their ability to exercise power.
I remember when Obama got elected in 2008, all the pundits were gleefully explaining how he was a master of social media and had this expert team of young digital natives who had used big data to target their bring out the vote efforts, blah blah blah, and how the doddering old Republicans were going to be left in the dust and would never win an election again.
The biggest threat to democracy is the dissolution of faith in democracy caused by immensely popular politicians who fail to keep the promises that get them elected. I'm not just talking about one party.
I don't get the avalanche of criticism.<p>First, enforcing strict freedom of speech is regulation too. It goes both ways. Don't like Twitter censoring tweets? Regulate it to force it to publish everything. Or everything but racist stuff. Or whatever you want. Unregulated Twitter can do whatever, it can change your tweets, put words into your mouth etc.<p>Second, any common good ends up abused if you allow it. Ever been to an unmaintained park where anything is allowed? It's all dog shit and broken glass. It stops being useful as a park, stops being useful to the majority of users, stops being useful to anyone but a small minority who abuse what should be a common resource.<p>Social media have become common assets (at least the service they provide) so it seems natural to me that they need same protection. I don't mind people writing what I consider crazy or even mildly offensive / racist etc. I mind organised groups abusing such spaces to create impression of popular opinion with malicious intent. We now know beyond reasonable doubt this does happen.
There is a creepy amount of skepticism on his comments.<p>FB and Twitter have <i>no</i> obligation to public health. Their entire profit motive is to burn the fucking country to the ground if their Q3 earnings look good. Put neighbor against neighbor? Why not? Destroy the foundations of democracy to maximize engagement? Sure!<p>So a politician (flawed as he is and with some withering disappointments as a leader) says "Hey, this shit is unhealthy for democracy!"<p>It seems so obvious that he is correct, but it seems more important to people here to disagree with the messenger than to consider the message.
Seems like a lot of people have a problem when a specific billionaire (Musk) purchases Twitter. But why do the rest of billionaires get an exception when they own Twitter or other media companies? It seems like the free speech and the "billionaire" label is just a certain group of people use to protect their interest more than it is any genuinely held believes.
Time was once a POTUS that had served two terms already was done, they would go into retirement and you would hear very little out of them. Maybe they’d be trotted out for an endorsement or party morale boosting speech but that was about the extent of it.<p>I liked that.
When information regulation is combined with all powerful intellegence agencies you get a very dangerous combination. Their whole game is deception and controlling what information gets out, then covering their asses when anything goes wrong. Zero transparency,
'due process', or independent review processes.<p>It's incredibly easy to manufacture 'consensus' among gov experts and feed 'anonymous sources' to news agencies and influencers.<p>This goes way beyond trying to tip the scales of partisan culture wars.
Leaders of the websites have no problem with this. Jack Dorsey was asked about it by the congress, and he just told them to make a law and Twitter will follow it. Mark said the same thing basically.<p>What's important is to get a bipartisan concensus about it.
Leveraging social media to create a divide is a symptom of the problem.<p>The underlying problem is the sheer amount of money and power to be gained by winning in America's 2-party system. So much so, that winning at all costs is the norm.<p>Winning at all costs, includes (but is not limited to) leveraging bots, PR firms and activists on social media to make one side fear and hate the other.
I feel like social media as it currently operates cannot operate alongside absolute free speech. The reason is really simple - the social media websites don't simply allow you to follow people and see what they say. They show you 'recommended content', they push content on you via features like 'trending' which also have editing. By doing this they're choosing which speech the user should be made to view. If Twitter (for example) simply showed me a feed of what people I follow post in chronological order and did nothing else then the whole absolute free speech thing would be fine. But they choose to get involved and show the 'outrageous' content that will try to get me to 'engage'. You can't have it both ways. Either take responsibility for all the content on your platform, or relinquish the power to manipulate and editorialise.
What he really means is that unregulated social media could cause his side to lose...<p>Media regulation is what dictatorships do, not democracies. The left should focus more on what it claims to support (the plight of the working class) if they want to win elections... People are upset about inflation and wages and the left establishment in most countries is doing fuck all.
I read this as "people are too dumb to know whats right and wrong". If you don't agree with something that is said, use your speech to argue against it, sorry you won't be able to shutdown others you disagree with.
I'm not really sure why this is taking on a political slant from commenters here aside from the fact that Obama as a politician is a polarizing figure. The content of what he said is completely accurate and just about any credible researcher in the field will tell you so. Misinformation and especially Disinformation is a very large problems that will have to be addressed in some way if we're to have an actual functioning democracy.<p>They certainly aren't the only issues we face, but calling for platforms to take greater accountability isn't and shouldn't somehow be viewed as political. It doesn't matter whether you're for red, blue, putin, Snoop or the Pope. If the places people go to consume information are allowed to become inundated with blatantly false information, that's a bad thing.<p>There is absolutely an argument that Twitter, FB, etc. should never have become peoples sources for information but the reality is that this is the world we live in and for better and worse and we need to craft policy based on people's actions not what they should do.
Wouldn't it be crazy if "the great filter" implied by the Fermi Paradox is not something like nuclear weapons but the kind of all-pervasive mass communication the internet allows? It's easy to see the threat from a huge bomb, much harder to see the threat of a "Tower of Babel" style infopocalypse where civilizations can no longer organize themselves to do anything significant.
It's probably more informative to read his speech than to read this LA Times article with it's near-clickbait headline.<p>I get the impression from the comments that people think Obama's out for government control of social networks, but that's not what he says in his speech.<p><a href="https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-at-stanford-7d7af7ba28af" rel="nofollow">https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...</a><p>He's not wrong about social media being a potential tool of destruction of democracy either by excessive regulation or excessive deregulation, and lists examples.<p>His question is, can we do better? Is it time to revisit section 230, for example? How do we train ourselves to be resistant to the forces on social media that are actively attempting to manipulate us with clickbait headlines?<p>The speech is worth a read.
Well Obama...I am pro free speach<p>And I empathize and understand people who talk about free speech in its most unadulterated way.<p>But there are tradeoffs and costs, lots of them have been already detailed so I'll focus on something else: productivity and initiative.<p>Social media lifted the veil on really how easily manipulated the avg. individual is. There is no turning back from that, no turning back from not knowing that information, it's almost like when you first get the concept of mortality and that one day you are going to die.<p>And those using social media to manipulate the avg. individual could be left-wing, right-wing, independent, greens, libertarians etc. But as we are seeing these days also billionaires with an agenda , cults, religious movements, corporations, NGOs, Secret Services etc.<p>For a person trying to make a living in this world, that's really scary, it damages productivity because given all the above people become extremely defensive and think twice before taking any initiative....they could become the target of some cult or political movement with just a simple action such as firing an employee or speaking their mind about something.<p>And the attack could come from every side or even multiple sides
Why is unregulated social media suddenly a problem? They've been doing questionable actions for a decade.<p>How come that when yesterday's misinformation becomes today's possibility, no accounts get unbanned? How come tech platforms have routinely banned the same person's accounts all on the same day? Tell me again about Hunter's laptop; I think that would have been extremely relevant about 2 years ago.
The misinformation fear mongering is more dangerous than any of the hypothetical boogeymen.<p>Why trust individuals to vote, if you cannot trust their discernment?<p>If you must dictate truth and exclude information you disagree with, then at what point are regulators predetermining the outcome of the democratic process?<p>There are definite shortcomings to democracy. Tyranny of the majority is a popular critique. Presenting democracy as a virtue to be defended is problematic to be sure. But presenting it as a virtue while attacking the premises of democracy?<p>I cannot decide which is more absurd, a gov. regulator presuming to have an exclusive license on objective truth as if privy to divine revelation, or suggesting that individuals making their own decisions in regards to the information they consume is dangerous to democracy.<p>Humanity cannot regulate away "misinformation" anymore than Icarus could touch the sun. Is it hard to accept this as legitimate hubris. Propagandists desiring to regain tighter control over the flow of information seems infinitely more probable.<p>Does anyone else here remember when we said, "Information wants to be free" ?
> billionaire Elon Musk has been mounting a hostile takeover bid of the popular service Twitter<p>That's some pretty incompetent reporting.<p>Edit: Can we change the URL to the original source instead of driving traffic to bad journalism? <a href="https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-at-stanford-7d7af7ba28af" rel="nofollow">https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-on-disinformation-...</a>
Section 230 is the regulation.<p>>any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or<p>The problem was that censorship on social media has not been done in good faith and has far exceeded these regulations. Yet nobody ever got around to punishing social media for their violation of these regulations.<p>Now that Elon has made the effort to get Twitter into compliance and stop violating regulations, now you call them unregulated and want to change the rules?<p>I hope that Biden and friends try to change the rules so close to midterms. Lets see how that democracy goes after that.
The only threat to democracy that the free flow of information creates is to stymie the ability of corrupt politicians to maintain power. This is a good threat for our Republic to have.