from yesterday's NYT:
In private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, warning that the scourge of falsehoods online has eroded the foundations of democracy at home and abroad.
In a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, he is expected to add his voice to demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies polluting public discourse.
The urgency of the crisis — the internet’s “demand for crazy,” as he put it recently — has already pushed him further than he was ever prepared to go as president to take on social media.
“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms to make money but say to them that there’s certain practices you engage in that we don’t think are good for society,” Mr. Obama, now 60, said at a conference on disinformation this month organized by the University of Chicago and The Atlantic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/technology/barack-obama-disinformation.html
from yahoo finance:
"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."
Throughout an hourlong speech, Obama framed misinformation, harassment and other issues that plague social networks as the result of platforms designed with all the wrong incentives in place — incentives that wind up “turbocharging some of humanity's worst impulses.”
While the former president stopped short of digging into policy specifics, he did point to sweeping European regulatory initiatives like the Digital Markets Act as one path forward. He also pointed to possible reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content, and mentioned the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act by name. That piece of bipartisan legislation would require social platforms to open up their data to outside researchers.
Ultimately while Obama’s Stanford speech was a concise and thoughtful summary of the ways that social media is fraying modern society, it’s one unlikely to make any converts. Obama's commonsense, non-partisan ideas about how to transform tech will likely still prove polarizing, particularly among the crowd that propagated racist conspiracy theories about the former president — an onslaught of untruth that ultimately presaged the coming explosion of political misinformation.
Nonetheless, the political figure who presided over the rise of Big Tech does seem keen to sound the alarm about the existential threat that online misinformation poses to democratic society. Whether anyone will hear Obama's insights or not is another matter, but given the stakes, our possibly terminally distorted information landscape is certainly still worth talking about.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-says-social-media-well-222510489.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
