Obama’s plans to fight disinformation are better than most

Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A former president of the United States has a lot of big problems to tackle after they leave office. Jimmy Carter worked on housing. Clinton worked to fight HIV and AIDS. Barack Obama has been out of office for six years. Advisers say that he has begun drawing attention to an issue that has become increasingly important to him, and that is the issue of misinformation.

In the months after Donald Trump left office, the focus on the tech and political press began to fade into the background. The shift is understandable, as Trump was the most prominent spreader of misinformation in the world, and once he lost access to the Oval Office and his account, dozens of false claims that the media would otherwise have spent all day running down disappeared from the headlines.

Trumpism, particularly its false claim that the election was rigged for Joe Biden, has remained an ugly, powerful current in American life. Republican politicians use the Big Lie as a pretext for stripping away voting rights more than a year after Biden's inauguration. On occasion, this kind of misinformation even creeps into the mainstream of the American press, as when a Michigan outlet this week described the Republican Secretary of State hopefuls plan to tackle voter fraud.

On the other hand, the decay of our information environment is obvious: tech platforms that historically have been all but indifferent to the quality of information they promote; a decline in journalism jobs, particularly at local and regional publications, across the country; and a populace that increasingly doubts the legitimacy of the

I wrote yesterday that it can be easy to over-rotate on the idea that information quality alone is the root of our problems. Matt Yglesias put it this way at Slow Boring this week, that Democrats are too easily used as a scapegoat for political problems because of their use of disinformation. Yglesias is worried that it is an electoral dead end.

Less-educated people are less knowledgeable and less media literate, and that’s not ideal. But Democrats need to read the correlation in the correct direction and try harder to appeal to their values, not write them off as too misinformed to be reached.

Over the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to watch Obama make his case for the importance of addressing disinformation. Jeffrey Goldberg spoke at a conference organized by The Atlantic in Chicago. In that conversation, Obama said that he was surprised at how vulnerable American institutions are to those who would lie. He is worried that those lies pose a threat to democracy.

The stakes of this issue are important because it is difficult for us to get out of reality.

I heard the more refined version of the argument on Thursday. Obama delivered an hourlong keynote address at a conference titled "Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Realm", while he was in Palo Alto.

When a politician wanders into this realm, I usually brace myself for the small thoughts and half-baked solutions that usually follow. Obama's talk today demonstrated an excellent command of the scope and significance of our problems online, while also owning up to the limits of an approach focused solely on removing disinformation to repair our democracy.

He talked about the power and potential of a free and open internet, something that seems to have fallen into disfavor among both Democrats and Republicans. He acknowledged that social platforms helped to power his rise.

I might never have been elected president if it hadn't been for websites like MySpace and Facebook.

Some of that is intentional, he said, and some isn't. It requires a society-level response. He said that America could be doomed to one day be like modern-day Russia, in which an autocrat rises to power, restricts information flows, and undermines our democracy.

Obama said that social divisions predated Facebook. Efforts to regulate speech will often run afoul of the First Amendment, for which he affirmed his strong support.

According to Obama, one in five Americans refuse to get a vaccine because they think it will cause harm.

He said that it was because of the way platforms were designed to promote scandal and outrage. They have paid too little attention to the quality of the information that is traveling the farthest and the fastest. Lawmakers have not implemented meaningful regulations.

What should we do? Like most people who venture into these waters, Obama has the most trouble. His ideas are better than most of what Congress suggests, but they are limited. It is possible to imagine all of the president's most practical suggestions being implemented and still wonder how they could reverse a global slide into autocracy.

He makes several good suggestions. If a meat-packing company has a proprietary technique to keep our hot dogs fresh and clean, they don't.

circuit breakers would slow the spread of viral posts to give fact-checkers a chance to review them. Academics should have access to their systems. They should give money to nonprofits.

Obama says we should regulate tech platforms. Section 230, the law that exempts tech companies from legal liability in most cases for what their users post online, was briefly discussed. I would have liked to hear more about how the reforms would pass the First Amendment scrutiny.

platform employees were told to quit if no changes were made.

He said that the companies needed to have a north star other than just making money and increasing partisanship. You have the power to move things in the right direction to the employees of these companies. You have the ability to advocate for change. You can be a part of the redesign, or you can vote for the companies that are doing the right thing.

As a set of problems, I continue to worry about the downstream effects of electoral realities. If Republicans don't have to win a majority of voters through persuasion or compromise, and can simply brute force their way into office by curtailing voting rights, why would they ever temper the false claims that make that easier? How can platforms and media companies respond to a party that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of fair elections?

Power is abused when it is unaccountable. I don't know how you solve that at the platform level.

Platforms could play a big role in improving our information ecosystems. They could raise a lot of money by funding public media. They could use the template of their COVID response to promote high-quality information sources wherever they are showing news, and demote hyperpartisan outlets. They could slow the pace of posts to give the truth a chance to catch up.

Positive interactions and community building could be promoted by ending trends. They could form public-private partnerships to share information about state-level actors who are conducting information operations.

They could ignore the threats and focus on the next milestone on the product road map, the next set of quarterly earnings.

They would do well to remember the fate of internet platforms in Russia once autocracy was complete, because they would disappear one by one.

We won't get it right all at once.

One thing to deliver a speech is another thing to see the ideas through. Both platforms and Congress have been resistant to major changes for years now, and it's unclear what levers Obama will have to pull even if he were still president.

As we head into the elections, the use of lies and hoaxes to justify seizing power deserves a fresh look. Obama knows the stakes. We can believe in change if it ever happens.