In 2011, President Barack Obama went to Silicon Valley for a relaxed exchange of ideas with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The occasion was an open meeting with the employees of the social network in which the burning issues of the time were discussed: taxes, health, the promise of technology to solve the country’s problems.
More than a decade later, Obama heads to Silicon Valley again, this time delivering a darker message about the danger the tech giants have created for their own country.
In private meetings and public appearances over the past year, the former president has delved deeply into the public debate over misinformation and intentional disinformation, warning that the scourge of falsehoods spread online has eroded the foundations of democracy in the United States and beyond.
In a speech he delivered on Thursday (21) at Stanford University, Obama added his voice to the clamor for rules to curb the flood of lies that are polluting public discourse.
The urgency of the crisis — the “internet demand for crazy,” as Obama recently described it — has already pushed the former president to go further in tackling social media than he was willing to go when he was in the White House.
“I think it’s reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then adopt a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make money, but tell them there are certain practices that we don’t think benefit society,” Obama said during a conference on disinformation hosted by the University of Chicago and The Atlantic.
People close to Obama say the timing of his campaign was not due to a single cause, but to his widespread concern about the damage done to the foundations of democracy. It is being fought in the midst of a fierce but inconclusive debate over the best way to restore trust in online communication.
Legislators in Washington are so sharply divided that any legislative agreement seems unattainable. Democrats criticize giants like Facebook, renamed Meta, and Twitter for failing to remove harmful content from their sites. President Joe Biden has also been attacking the platforms that allowed the spread of lies about coronavirus vaccines, saying last year that they “are killing people”.
Republicans, on the other hand, accuse companies of suppressing free speech by censoring conservative voices — especially former President Donald Trump, banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. With so little in common in their views. about the problem, there is even less agreement on a possible solution.
It remains to be seen whether Obama’s contribution will influence the debate. While he has not endorsed any single solution or specific legislation, he hopes to launch a call across the political spectrum for a common vision.
“You have to think about how things will look after going through different partisan filters, but still make your best, most authentic arguments about how you see the world, what’s at stake and why,” said Jason Goldman, former -an executive at Twitter, Blogger and Medium who was the White House’s first digital director under Obama and continues to advise the former president.
“There is potential reason to believe that there is a positive exit from some of the quagmire we are in,” he added.
It is possible that Obama is not a perfect messenger about the dangers of disinformation. He was the first candidate to harness the power of social media to the presidency, in 2008, but then, as president, he did little to intervene when the darker side of social media — the spread of falsehoods, extremism, racism and violence — came to the fore. inside and outside the country.
“I kind of saw it start to grow — that is, the degree to which information, misinformation and purposeful disinformation were being used as weapons,” Obama said in Chicago, expressing something that came close to regret. “I think I underestimated the extent to which democracies were vulnerable to this, as indeed they were, including ours.”
People close to Obama say he became obsessed with disinformation after leaving the presidency. He reassessed, as many others have done, whether he had done enough to counter the information campaign commissioned by Russian President Vladimir Putin to skew the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
Obama began meeting in earnest with executives, activists and other experts last year after Donald Trump refused to recognize the 2020 election results, making unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud.
In his reflections on the subject, Obama does not say that he has discovered a perfect solution that has escaped the attention of others who study the topic. But by speaking more publicly about the issue, he hopes to be able to draw attention to the values of bodily conduct around which a consensus could take shape.
“This can be an effective little push to encourage much of the discussion that is already underway,” commented Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser. “With each passing day we see more examples of why this is important.”
During his administration, Obama touted the potential of technology companies to strengthen the economy with more skilled jobs and to drive democratic movements abroad. He has lured tech professionals like Goldman into his administration and filled his campaign coffers with fundraising events held in the homes of people like Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Meta, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.
It was a period of mutual admiration and little government oversight of the technology industry. Despite Obama’s endorsement of privacy regulations, no legislation to control companies in the industry was passed during his administration, although by then they had become economic giants that affect virtually every aspect of life.
Looking back at the approach taken by his administration, Obama said he would not point to any action or legislation that he could have handled differently. But now, looking back, according to Rhodes, he sees how optimism about online technologies, including social media, has overtaken caution.
Obama’s approach to the issue has been characteristically deliberative. He consulted with the CEOs of Apple, Alphabet and other companies. Through the Obama Foundation in Chicago, he also has frequent meetings with scholars, who report on their own experiences with disinformation in a number of areas around the world.
Building on these deliberations, some potential solutions are starting to take shape. While Obama says he remains “almost an outspoken advocate of the First Amendment,” he has focused on the need for greater transparency and regulatory oversight of online speech, as well as the ways companies have profited from manipulating the public through their own algorithms.
In Congress, lawmakers have already proposed the creation of a regulatory agency dedicated to overseeing companies on the Internet. Others propose that tech companies be stripped of a legal shield that protects them from legal liability.
But none of these proposals went ahead, despite the fact that at the same time the European Union enacted into law some of the practices that are still only theoretically being discussed in Washington.
Kyle Plotkin, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Montana, said Obama “can be a polarizing figure” and can inflame discussion of disinformation rather than calm it.
“Your die-hard fans will love to see you give your opinion, but others won’t,” Plotkin said. “I don’t think he’s going to help the discussion move forward. On the contrary, he makes it regress.”
