Remember how the usefulness of the internet and social media was championed by media during the Arab Spring movement? Now it's suddenly a threat to our democracy.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/obama-interne...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/obama-interne...
> Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
I don't think that's out of place in a conversation about today's internet/media landscape. He's not saying "the internet is bad," or even "social media is bad"; he's saying that the internet clearly has the potential to amplify disinformation to a point that becomes harmful, something I think anyone would be hard-pressed to disagree with.
A lot of people are ok with lies if they confirm what they already believe.
The only people who care about "truth" in capitalism are shareholders and affluent individuals. It binds them to the culture and when a bunch of lowlifes and poorer people tell them "fuck off" essentially, they get pissy and upset that the people don't like the status quo.
These are the people that care about stability, in order to enjoy their wealth. A country that cannot agree with one another on objective reality isn't one that can be governed, and is destined to fall.
Which might be why so many of the "disinformation" fighters come from the establishment, and so many proprietors of distortions and lies are those with grudges (Greenwald, Bannon, etc.) or nothing to lose (QAnon/MAGA types).
It comes down to a difference between people that benefit from a stable status quo, and those (for whatever reason) that want to tear it down.
So clearly we need the gov’t to step in help the rabble who are clearly unable to figure out the “truth” on their own.
Does he realize this is the exact argument authoritarian gov’ts give for censorship? We need to censor to avoid “social disharmony” or stop those “fomenting discord”.
> Obama: Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring...I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.
> Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
> Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.
The second paragraph in the article is more in line with what he actually said:
> Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
There's a big difference between saying that the internet is the single biggest threat to society, and saying that it (and more specifically, social media) has helped some people communicate disinformation and "fake news" - which is what Obama see as the threat to society in this context.