I thought it was interesting/a bit strange that Obama mentioned this problem during his "farewell tour" press conference in Germany (along with the portrayal of USA=Russia and the like on social media).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BikQFWNYct4&t=3480s
I refuse to believe that he's not smart enough to know how problematic that is. It's not totally clear from his speech (does he just want a central repository of trusted information, or does he want to actually remove certain information from the internet?) but it's a perfect example of Obama couching dangerous ideas in soft, pragmatic language.
Curating is a very broad term, it can mean anything between having websites soft-rated, wikipedia-style crowdsourced curating, and opaque state-level censorship. The devil is in the details.
>Secondly, this wave of populism that seems to engulf us, well, look at -- and it seems, in your words, to come from the United States. Look at the European Parliament. There are a lot of people who are looking for simplistic solutions, who are sort of preaching policies of -- well, very unfriendly policies. We have them here in Europe, too. We have them here in Germany, too.
>And to take up where the President left off, digitization is, in a way, a disruptive force, a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change, transformation of a society. Look at the history of the printing press -- when this was invented, what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization -- what sort of consequences that had. Very often it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies, and it took a while until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and to manage and steer this. And I think we live in a period of profound transformation, very similar to when we had a translation from agricultural societies to industrial societies.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/17/remar...