Former President Barack Obama said Thursday that he still regrets not seeing the rampant disinformation in the United States while he was president, especially around the 2016 election.
In a speech at Stanford University on the dangers of misinformation, Obama touched on the 2016 election, which US intelligence has long confirmed that Russia has intervened.
The former president said no one in his administration was surprised that Russia had spread disinformation on social media platforms in an attempt to influence the US election, but regretted that he did not fully understand how vulnerable America was to such content.
“What still irritates me was my failure to fully appreciate at the time how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, even though I myself had spent years as a target of misinformation,” Obama said, as if referring to the racist and baseless. conspiracy theory that he was not born in the United States.
In his speech, Obama expressed fears of disinformation in the digital age and the new information ecosystem, warning that it threatens democracy.
He buried himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon, who serves as a strategist for former President Trump, to increase disinformation, saying people like them “understand that people don’t need to believe this information to weaken democrats.” institutions “.
“You just have to flood the country’s public square with enough raw wastewater. “You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theories so that citizens no longer know what to believe,” Obama said.
On the eve of the 2016 election, Russian actors used social media platforms such as Facebook to spread false or misleading information online, among other interventions.
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Obama also pointed out that disinformation is evolving in other advanced and insidious ways, citing false information during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, which Donald Trump and his supporters falsely claim were stolen, such as example.
Obama said the seeds for spreading misinformation existed before Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“Putin did not do that. He shouldn’t have, “Obama said. “We did it to ourselves.”
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