Former President Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at a one-day symposium, titled "Challenges to Democracy," co-hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation, on the Stanford campus on April 21.
Obama spoke at length on topics such as the First Amendment, social media, censorship, technology, and the news media.
Obama said:
Not all problems we are seeing now are an inevitable byproduct of this new technology. They're also the result of very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet, generally, and social media platforms in particular — decisions that intentionally or not have made democracies more vulnerable.
Obama claimed that societal divisions, from sexism and racism to ethno-nationalism, were amplified on social media, adding that "our blind spots, our prejudices aren't challenged; they're reinforced."
Obama said many forms of disinformation originate on traditional media platforms, and social networks have helped accelerate the decline of newspapers and traditional news sources.
Obama also said the overwhelming information surplus made it difficult to discern the truth because "our brains aren't accustomed to taking in this much information this fast, and a lot of us are experiencing overload."
Obama claimed that "People like Putin and Steve Bannon understand it's not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing, that citizens no longer know what to believe."
Obama said that in time, "we lose our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction. Or maybe we just stop caring,"
Obama said, "Freedom of speech is at the heart of every democratic society" and branded himself as "pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist" but added that the First Amendment does not apply to social media companies.
"The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn't apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter," Obama said, calling for content moderation and censorship on social media.
"While content moderation can limit the distribution of clearly dangerous content, it doesn't go far enough," said Obama.
Since Obama mentioned disinformation, it is worth looking back at the records of disinformation in the U.S. in recent times.
From the day President Trump was elected in 2016 'til the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats in Washington and their propaganda wing that claims to be the news media have spearheaded myriad disinformation campaigns.
Their most audacious concoction was the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that was amplified by rogue Democrat operatives in Washington and the media. The disinformation campaign caused the appointment of a special counsel, resulting in over two years of uncertainty. It probably swayed the 2018 midterms, which handed the Democrats the House and led to two gratuitous impeachments of President Trump.
In addition to the Russia collusion narrative, they peddled numerous other fabrications about President Trump. On odd days, he was bigoted, senile, and clueless; on even days, he was a racist evil genius.
During the 2020 elections, Big Media and Big Tech colluded to censor the most important news story of that time about Hunter Biden's laptop . The New York Post had reported that there were text messages, emails, and financial documents on Hunter's laptop that proved that then–vice president Biden had abused his power to enrich himself and his family. The laptop also contained photos of an inebriated Hunter in a compromised position with a prostitute and using racist language.
Despite ample evidence, pundits on MSNBC , NBC , The Washington Post , The Daily Beast , CNN , Politico The HuffPost , and The New York Times worked in unison to discredit the story even calling it Russian disinformation. This was repeated by Biden during the presidential debates.
The rigging of the 2020 elections wasn't only at the ballot, but also in the way the playing field was tilted emphatically in favor of Democrats.
For four years, voters were relentlessly fed misinformation about Trump while negative stories about Biden were suppressed. It is a testament to his record and popularity that despite all this, Trump managed to secure 74 million votes in 2020.
The 2020 presidential election was a vile assault on democracy.
Democrats, including many Obama acolytes, were responsible for the disinformation campaigns and fabrication that led to the rigging of an election.
There have been several other instances of the news media and Big Tech suppressing information that goes against the Democrat agenda. Merely questioning the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine can get users de-platformed from social media. Matters have deteriorated to such an extent that even satire is not being spared.
Yet today, Obama is claiming to stand against disinformation.
This has been a standard old Obama ploy. When he presided over a catastrophe such as Obamacare during his White House days, instead of accepting the blame, he would address the situation like a neutral commentator, almost as if he were a bystander. At times he would present a critique of the situation, implying that his ideas were brilliant but the implementation by his subordinates was flawed. If nothing else worked, he blamed the Republicans or his predecessor, President George W. Bush. This was his attempt to feign honesty and objectivity for which his myriad cheerleaders in the media would then slobber and fawn over him endlessly.
Obama seemed to be repeating his maneuver at Stanford.
Apart from the muddled, puzzling, and contradictory messaging and the obvious hypocrisy, the question is why pontificate now?
The Democrats know that they are going to receive an emphatic drubbing during the midterms in November.
As they did in 2016, do they intend to reject the electoral results and blame it all on social media disinformation? The fact that Obama called out both Putin and Bannon by name is ample proof of where this is leading.
The question is, how far will they go? Will they demand the appointment of another special counsel? Will they just refuse to vacate their space until the probe is complete? Will they hire activists to crowd Washington and harass GOP lawmakers? Will activists heckle GOP lawmakers in the corridors of the Capitol Building? Will it all be done to "save Democracy"?
There is never any telling what the Democrats will say or do upon electoral defeats, except that it's bound to be something unprecedented, brazen, and outrageous.
Back in 2016, the GOP controlled the Senate, the House, and the White House, yet they couldn't stop the Democrats from running their disinformation campaign and even compelled Republicans to repeat the false premise that the Russians interfered in the elections.
It is essential that the GOP have a strategy to counter Democrat disinformation. Hopefully, the GOP will stand its ground and not be affected by the noise in Washington and in the news media. They need to learn to ridicule and dismiss any false Democrat premises, else democracy will really be in danger.
The GOP must remember that the Democrats worry about democracy only when they lose elections.
The regime media (the amalgamation of the legacy media, elitist opinion writers, and the internet troika: Google/Facebook/Twitter) finds itself in a quandary of its own making. As the nation descends into recession and societal turmoil, the candidate for whom they prostituted themselves, Joe Biden, reveals on a daily basis that he is not mentally or physically capable of being President. Further, it has become increasingly more difficult to continuously obfuscate not only the ongoing revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop but Joe’s life-long history of corruption and mendacity.
By comparison, for four years, despite a lack of evidence coupled with numerous exculpatory investigations, this same cabal incessantly promoted the fictitious narrative that Donald Trump was a racist, a xenophobe, a demagogue, and the most corrupt person to ever serve as president of the United States.
Accordingly, the regime media proclaimed that was in the nation’s vital interest to replace Trump with the “decent, honest, and honorable ” Joe Biden. As he has the “experience and character” to rescue the nation and restore “decency and honor ” in the White House.
The quandary: how does the regime media avoid the exposure of Joe Biden’s lifelong corruption and failures without the public’s inevitable comparison of the two men, their families, and their accomplishments? A comparison that would result in the effective exoneration and rehabilitation of Donald Trump, whom they relentlessly accused of being the most unscrupulous person on earth. A cudgel they could no longer use if he decides to run for the presidency in 2024.
Their only option is to continue steadfastly limiting any exposure of Joe’s career-long penchant for selling his political office for personal gain. They will have to throw Hunter Biden under the bus by claiming he was solely responsible for any revelations of corruption emanating from his abandoned laptop.
Why do they need to obfuscate Joe Biden’s personal history? They cannot continue to muddle the revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop if it is general knowledge that Joe Biden’s malfeasance and the “Biden Family Enterprise” began almost immediately after Joe Biden was first sworn in as a Senator in 1973 when Hunter was two years old.
In August of 2019, Politico International ,unsecured loans from a failing Delaware bank. Within less than 18 months the venture started to unravel, and James was unable to make the loan payments. Joe intervened with the bank’s Chairman to make certain the bank did not harass James for payment or foreclose on the nightclub.
Miraculously, James was able to find another bank, which was on the Federal Reserve watch list, that gave him a $500,000 ($2.6 million in 2022 dollars) loan. Around the same time Joe Biden met with that bank’s senior vice-president on “other matters” -- no doubt a coincidence. The nightclub venture soon failed, leaving behind a trail of lawsuits and unpaid loans and debts.
The Bidens sanctimoniously proclaimed that Joe and his status as a U.S. Senator had nothing to do with James getting the loans. The fact that Joe served on the Senate Banking Committee (which oversees bank regulatory agencies) and his 23-year-old brother with no business experience received extraordinary – actually, unheard-of -- loans from two banks under scrutiny by the government was, no doubt, also a mere coincidence.
Thus began a pattern that over the years that continued to include James and occasionally other members of the Biden family, and eventually Hunter Biden as the ultimate front for the Biden family business. A family enterprise that despite chartering and acquiring numerous companies over the decades never operated a successful business. Perhaps no prominent family in American history has been involved in so many consistent business failures. The only successful aspect of the “Biden Family Enterprise” was selling Joe Biden and his political influence.
It was while Joe Biden was vice-president that the flood gates opened and what was a domestic influence-peddling business expanded globally into Ukraine, China, Russia and Kazakhstan, among other nations. The layers of greed and unabashed willingness to sell access to the second-highest office in the country is mind-boggling. The most egregious examples are five deals with the Communist Chinese and the subsequent payments to Hunter Biden and the Biden family valued at $31 million .
For the past five decades, the legacy media and virtually all of Washington, D.C. has known about Joe Biden’s corruption and penchant for being a serial fabulist and compulsive liar. However, when Donald Trump was elected President, he was immediately inundated with false and hyperbolic corruption charges.
A month before his inauguration on January 20, 2017, Politico Magazine most corrupt in American history .
Unsurprisingly, by the end of his term the regime media and left-wing “historians” declared that Donald Trump was not only the most corrupt president in American history but also the worst .
The New York Times, in a hyperbolic October 2020 editorial , pleaded with the public to vote for Joe Biden “and return the country to a more peaceful, stable and respectful form of self-governance ” and accused Trump of “rampant corruption, celebrations of violence, gross negligence with people’s health and incompetence—the worst American president in modern history.”
It would not be an overstatement to say that Donald Trump and his immediate family are the most investigated, vetted and audited people in American history. Yet virtually nothing substantive has been found. I spent nearly forty years in international finance and interacted with numerous domestic and international real estate developers. Success in this field requires a single-minded focus and determination in order to build or acquire properties. Virtually all developers at some point have skirted the law, or greased palms, or by-passed regulations.
In light of Trump’s massive business success and nearly 50 years in real estate development, it is remarkable, considering the armies of investigators and auditors with unlimited budgets, that nothing of consequence has been unearthed. Which confirms that Donald Trump is among the least corrupt men to serve as President of the United States. In other words, Donald Trump is the antithesis of Joe Biden.
That is why the regime media, and the Democrat Party will do everything possible to avoid the full exposure of the decades of corruption with
in the “Biden Family Enterprise.” They cannot run the risk of the inevitable comparison of Donald Trump and his family to Joe Biden and his family.
Nor can the regime media risk the unmasking of their primary role in not only falsely incriminating Donald Trump but duplicitously praising and overtly suppressing damning information about Joe Biden during an election. As the citizenry will rightfully conclude that they are chiefly responsible for the disastrous state of affairs in the country today.Photo credit: Michael Vadon CC BY-SA 4.0 license
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs , GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics , investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND BILLIONAIRES.
BIDENOMICS did not start with the bankster regime of lawyer Barack Obama, Lawyer Eric Holder and bribes sucking parasite lawyer Joe Biden and the Biden Crime family. Billary Clinton turned the Democrat party into a franchise owned by banksters and Wall Street.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street. JOHN BINDER
The Obama-Biden Disinformation Campaigns Obama criticizes what he and his third-term stand-in have done themselves.
Wed Apr 20, 2022
Former President Barack Obama offered his definition of a “disinformation campaign” during his recent appearance at a conference sponsored by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics on "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy." Obama explained that it is "a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don't like."
Obama’s musings about what he considered to be such “toxic information” on social media that needed to be regulated posed a potential threat of a direct assault on the First Amendment . Moreover, by his own definition, Barack Obama’s presidency was an all-out, eight-year “disinformation campaign.”
While hard to believe, the Biden administration is turning out to be even worse in the “disinformation” department.
Turning first to the days of the Obama presidency, here are just three examples of outrageous disinformation that the former president and his administration were spreading:
1. Obamacare
In remarks that then-President Obama delivered at the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009 , he promised the American people: "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."
It was a complete lie that Obama and his senior administration officials spread about Obamacare scores of times.
Many Americans were shocked after they received notices cancelling their individual plans that did not meet Obamacare’s new mandatory standards for what all health insurance policies must provide. This forced the Obama administration to scramble to cushion the blow. In late 2013, Obama even issued an apology to those facing the loss of their individual health insurance due to Obamacare regulations.
During the recent "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" at which Barack Obama spoke, he glided over that history. He tried to explain away his past disinformation about Obamacare with even more disinformation. The former president claimed that he had been referring only to health insurance offered by employers, which was not the qualifier he used at the time when he assured Americans who liked their heath care insurance plans that they could keep them.
In any case, Obamacare’s new minimum standards that applied to employer-based health insurance policies, including requiring employers to offer coverage to dependents up to age 26, made these policies more expensive for employers and employees.
Some businesses dropped their health insurance coverage for employees altogether. Some employees with employer-based health insurance policies found themselves having to pay higher premiums, deductibles, and copayments since the passage of Obamacare. Yet Obamacare did not permit some people enrolled in employer-based coverage to pay lower premiums by allowing them to buy subsidized Marketplace coverage.
All of this did not comport with the Obama administration’s representations about Obamacare that Americans who liked their health care insurance plans would still be able to keep them.
Yet Obama had the audacity to say during his remarks at the "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" conference that “I actually, to this day, believe that what I said was accurate.”
Barack Obama continues to deserve four Pinocchios for his own disinformation on Obamacare.
2. The Benghazi Terrorist Attack
The Obama administration initially spread disinformation regarding the assault that commenced on September 11, 2012 against the U.S. consulate and nearby annex in Benghazi, Libya. U.S. ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed during that assault.
The evidence clearly established early-on that the assault was a premeditated Islamic jihadist attack. Yet, Obama’s White House spokesman Jay Carney falsely claimed during a press briefing on September 14th that the assault was “in response to a video, a film… that is offensive to Muslims." Obama’s then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice continued the disinformation campaign on national television during five Sunday news shows. It took more than a week after the Benghazi assault for Obama administration officials to finally admit publicly that it was a premeditated terrorist attack.
3. The Iran Nuclear Deal
Then-President Obama and other senior Obama administration officials lied about the terms of the disastrous nuclear deal that the Obama administration agreed to with Iran, in order to sell it to the American people. They falsely claimed, for example, that the nuclear deal would include “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Instead, what the Obama administration actually agreed to were neither “anytime” nor “anywhere” inspections. The Iranian regime remained firmly in control of access and barred inspections of its military sites altogether.
A New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes used words like “false” and “largely manufactured” to describe so-called “information” that Obama himself had dished out to Americans about the deal.
Rhodes explained the Obama administration’s information manipulation strategy vis a vis the press. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes said. The administration rounded up so-called “experts” who “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Turning to President Joe Biden, he and his administration have followed in the footsteps of his former boss in spreading disinformation and have even taken their disinformation campaign further.
President Biden’s self-righteous White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who is reportedly negotiating to join MSNBC while still briefing reporters from her White House podium, is one of the Biden administration’s biggest purveyor of disinformation besides President Biden himself. No wonder Psaki hates being challenged with probing questions from outlets such as Fox News, which confront the Biden administration with its misleading and contradictory statements.
Psaki recently displayed her unprofessionalism during an on-stage interview with “Pod Save America.” Without a shred of evidence, Psaki accused Fox News of feeding its reporters, including White House correspondent Peter Doocy, questions that “might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch.” Psaki’s insult echoed President Biden’s own hot-mic epithet that he uttered earlier this year about Doocy.
Fox News anchor and former White House correspondent John Roberts put Jen Psaki in her place with this tweet : “Note to @PressSec. @pdoocy makes the decisions on what topics he wants to quiz you on, and develops the questions himself. His philosophy is a basic tenet of journalism. Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. If that makes all of us "stupid s.o.b.s", so be it.”
It is becoming virtually impossible to separate the truth from the disinformation spread by the Biden administration.
One of President Biden’s most outrageous examples of promoting disinformation to the American people was the claim that his disastrous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan was an "extraordinary success." The American people were not fooled, however. Thirteen U.S. service members dead, Americans and Afghan allies left behind to fend for themselves, and billions of dollars of sophisticated military equipment abandoned in Afghanistan to the Taliban are not the ingredients of “an extraordinary success.”
Then there is the Biden administration’s immigration fiasco. According to President Biden and senior members of his administration, the record-setting flood of illegal immigrants surging across the U.S.-Mexico border that began shortly after President Biden took office was just a “seasonal” phenomenon. They reluctantly admitted it was a “challenge,” but they told the American people repeatedly that the huge and growing influx of illegal immigrants into the country was certainly not a crisis.
The administration continues to play fast and loose with the truth about the horrendous conditions at the border and how illegal immigrants are being transported secretly to various parts of the United States after their release.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris falsely accused Border Patrol agents on horseback of using their reins to whip Haitians as they were trying to cross the Rio Grande. The photographer who took the photo of the encounter that Biden and Harris exploited said that his images had been “misconstrued” and that he had not seen the Border Agents ever “whip anybody.”
Despite this eyewitness account from the photographer who took the photos of the incident in question, Biden and Harris did not retract their accusation. President Biden and his so-called “Border Czar” were willing to throw overworked law enforcement officers who were simply doing their job under the bus with disinformation. It was all part of the Biden administration’s effort to divert the American people's attention from its disastrous open-border immigration policies.
The accused Border Patrol agents have since been cleared of wrongdoing. But President Biden and Vice President Harris have still not publicly apologized for their disinformation that smeared the reputations of the wrongly accused agents.
The Biden administration’s disinformation campaign has extended to the economy. President Biden and his senior administration officials first tried to downplay the inflation that has skyrocketed on President Biden’s watch as “transitory.” Then the pandemic and supply chain issues were blamed for the inflation until it became “Putin’s inflation.” Anything to shift blame from the reckless spendthrift legislation that President Biden and his Democrat colleagues pushed through Congress, as well as their war on fossil fuels, which were mostly responsible for triggering the inflation spike.
President Biden has also spread disinformation about laws passed in red states that he did not like, such as Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 and Florida’s Protect Parental Rights in Education law.
President Biden condemned Georgia’s election law, which protects the sanctity of the vote with common sense procedural safeguards, as “Jim Crow on steroids" and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Biden sank to a new demagogic low when he resorted to conjuring up disturbing images of the South’s real Jim Crow segregationist past in an effort to link such images to Georgia’s 2021 election law. The president then followed up with a speech in Atlanta during which he despicably likened the senators opposed to a broad federal takeover of the voting process to notorious racists of the past such as George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis.
The truth is that in some respects Georgia’s law provides more voting rights, such as the right to cast no-excuse absentee ballots, than does Biden’s home state of Delaware or New York for that matter.
Reasonable people can disagree on policy issues such as how to protect fairly both voting access rights and election integrity. They should debate their positions on the merits. But President Biden decided instead to embark on his usual disinformation campaign to smear whomever and whatever he opposes.
The Biden White House has also spread disinformation about Florida’s Protect Parental Rights in Education law by falsely claiming that it is “designed to attack LGBTQI+ kids.” President Biden called the law “hateful.”
Florida’s law is neither hateful nor anti-LGBTQI+. What the law actually does is to protect children in kindergarten through third grade from becoming a captive audience for school instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity before they are ready to comprehend what they would be hearing. And it guarantees parents more rights in deciding how to handle such sensitive subjects with their impressionable children. The Biden administration and its leftwing base are trying to incite an emotional response with a false narrative of identity victimhood.
There are plenty more examples of the Biden administration ‘s spread of disinformation. Its lies and evasions about the president’s knowledge of his son Hunter’s business dealings and the president’s possible involvement come to mind, for example.
Suffice it to say that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have their own explaining to do when it comes to their abuse of the presidency in spreading disinformation to the American people.
Obama, a 'First Amendment Absolutist,' Calls for Social Media 'Regulation'
Former President Barack Obama urges "smart regulation" of speech on social media, in a speech at Stanford University in Palo Alto on April 21, 2022. (Photo: Screen capture)
(CNSNews.com) - In a lengthy speech at Stanford University on Thursday, former President Barack Obama noted that "Freedom of speech is at the heart of every democratic society," and he declared himself to be "pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist."
"I believe that in most instances the answer to bad speech is good speech. I believe that the free, robust, sometimes antagonistic exchange of ideas produces better outcomes and a healthier society," Obama said.
But when it comes to social media companies, "regulation has to be part of the answer," Obama said.
Obama said content moderation "doesn't go far enough" in limiting the distribution of "clearly dangerous content."
"Now, some companies have been taking the next step in managing toxic content, experimenting with new product designs that, to use just one example, add friction to slow the spread of potentially harmful content. And that kind of innovation is a step in the right direction. It should be applauded, but I also think decisions like this shouldn’t be left solely to private interests," Obama said.
"These decisions affect all of us, and just like every other industry that has a big impact in our society, that means these big platforms need to be subject to some level of public oversight and regulation."
Obama said he's "not convinced" that the wholesale repeal of Section 230 is the answer. Section 230 of the U.S. Code generally shields social media companies from lawsuits for content that third parties post on their platforms.
And here is where the "First Amendment absolutist" called for regulation:
"A regulatory structure, a smart one, needs to be in place, designed in consultation with tech companies, and experts and communities that are affected, including communities of color and others that sometimes are not well represented here in Silicon Valley, that will allow these companies to operate effectively while also slowing the spread of harmful content. In some cases, industry standards may replace or substitute for regulation, but regulation has to be part of the answer.
"Beyond that, tech companies need to be more transparent about how they operate. So much of the conversation around disinformation is focused on what people post. The bigger issue is what content these platforms promote.
"Algorithms have evolved to the point where nobody on the outside of these companies can accurately predict what they’ll do, unless they’re really sophisticated and spend a lot of time tracking it. And sometimes, even the people who build them aren’t sure. That’s a problem.
"In a democracy, we can rightly expect companies to subject the design of their products and services to some level of scrutiny. At minimum, they should have to share that information with researchers and regulators who are charged with keeping the rest of us safe."
Obama told Stanford students the main reason for the "weakening" of democracies is "the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information."
He noted that the Internet -- the "information revolution" -- "has been transformative," even helping to elect him president twice.
"But like all advances in technology," he said, "this progress has had unintended consequences that sometimes come at a price. And in this case, we see that our new information ecosystem is turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses."
'Reinvigorate quality journalism'
Obama used the latter part of his speech to urge Americans to break through their "information bubbles" and to "broaden" their perspectives.
"As citizens, we have to take it upon ourselves to become better consumers of news, looking at sources, thinking before we share and teaching our kids to become critical thinkers who know how to evaluate sources and separate opinion from fact," he said.
"In fact, a number of school districts around the country are working to train kids in this kind of online media literacy, not around any particular ideological perspective, but just how to check a source. Does this person who’s typing in his mother’s basement in his underwear seem a credible authority on climate change? (Laughter.) That’s something we should all want to support.
"Part of this project is also going to require us was finding creative ways to reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism, because one of the challenges we have, part of the reason that you’ve seen increased polarization, is all media has become nationalized and hence, more ideological.
"And one encouraging trend has been a number of nonprofit newsrooms beginning to pop up in places like Baltimore, Houston, my hometown of Chicago, all aimed at providing essential coverage of what’s happening locally and in statehouses. And that’s an example of how new models of journalism are possible, along with smart ways for communities to reinvigorate local news."
Obama took a few swipes at Republicans in his speech, including this one:
"If Republican elected officials with a few notable courageous exceptions, and I’m not going to mention them, because I don’t want them to be criticized for having been praised by me — (laughter) — but if the vast majority of elected Republican officials keep insisting that there’s nothing wrong with saying an election was stolen without a shred of evidence, when they know better, this isn’t going to work."
Obama said now is the time for everyone to "pick a side." "We have a choice right now. Do we allow our democracy to wither or do we make it better? That’s the choice we face, and it is a choice worth embracing."
Obama bemoaned the "steady stream of bile and vitriol" on social media, but he said, "it doesn’t have to be that way."
He described handwritten signs, TV, the Internet and social media as "tools."
"At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them, and we can remake them. It’s up to each of us to decide what we value, and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values.
"And I believe we should use every tool at our disposal to secure our greatest gift, a government of, by, for the people for generations to come. And I hope you agree with me, and I look forward to you joining in the work."
Media Research Center: Big Tech Has Censored Biden Criticism More Than 600 Times AP Photo/Brennan Linsley 2:17
Data released by media bias watchdog Media Research Center (MRC) has found that Big Tech companies including Twitter and Facebook have censored criticism of Joe Biden 646 times from the start of the 2020 presidential election cycle to today.
The data was gathered through MRC’s CensorTrack database , which tracks censorship of prominent political voices by leading Silicon Valley platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg Smiles during testimony (Pool/Getty)
Via the Media Research Center :
Big Tech’s campaign to protect President Joe Biden and his agenda has continued unabated. The Media Research Center found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticized Biden on social media over the past two years. This included 140 cases of Big Tech censoring people over the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden story in late 2020.
MRC Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022. The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day.
The worst cases of censorship involved platforms targeting anyone who dared to speak about any subject related to the New York Post bombshell Hunter Biden story. The Post investigated Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt foreign business dealings. Big Tech’s cancellation of that story helped shift the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. Twitter locked the Post’ s account for 17 days. In addition, Twitter slapped a “warning label” on the GOP House Judiciary Committee’s website for linking to the Post story.
A poll previously by the MRC found that Big Tech censorship of the Hunter Biden story probably cost Trump the election, with a large number of responders saying they would have voted differently had they known about the story.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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