Obama’s Crusade against Fake News

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, April 22, 2022

 

Former president Barack Obama went to Stanford yesterday to explain how “disinformation” is a threat to our democracy. Selected media outlets hinted that the subject of disinformation was likely to become a major theme of Obama’s post-presidency.

 

Obama did Obama things. For instance, he noted that social media had enabled exciting movements, like his own election, but that it also had serious downsides and risks, like the election of Donald Trump.

 

And he endorsed pleasant-sounding generalities. He’s for “whatever” changes to social media and tech companies will assist in an “inclusive democracy.” He’s against things that are against an inclusive democracy.

 

And he committed himself to vaguely described reforms, such as “revisiting” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — those lines in the anti-pornography bill that empower social-media networks to edit and redistribute user-generated content without assuming the legal liability of being that content’s publisher.

 

In trying to smooth out his worldview for a progressive audience, Obama made weird errors in describing foreign affairs. At one point he said Vladimir Putin was committed to “ethno-nationalism.” Which was odd, since Putin has regularly called nationalism a “virus” that threatens the multi-ethnic, if illiberal, Russian Federation. He called European legislation on social media a model that should encourage democracies to work together — even though Germany’s communications law is so authoritarian that the Philippines and Russia have praised it as an exemplar for their own.

 

There were strange contradictions throughout. For instance, he tried to mollify concerns that “democratic oversight” and regulation of the tech industry would hamper trust. He cited the fact that when regulators raise the standards for a product, it can help the public come to trust that product.

 

But he made this argument just minutes after proclaiming that “disinformation was killing people” because 20 percent of Americans had refused to take a vaccine for Covid-19. The government enabled the development of that vaccine by drastically cutting down the regulations and normal FDA testing requirements. This was a trade-off deemed worthwhile in an emergency. And in light of this trade-off, a progressive should see 80 percent as a high number — a success! — given the circumstances and the continually diminishing threat from the virus. Instead, for Obama, anything short of unanimity is a failure attributable to disinformation. This is a view of political and personal deliberation that is mercilessly impatient and conformist.

 

The contradictions and self-serving asides highlighted one of the major problems with Obama’s speech and his approach to social media and technology. Although he acknowledged that social media did not create the divisions in American and other societies, he barely had a handle on whether social media was causing a phenomenon to happen or merely revealing it to be happening. Was social media driving conservatives to do what they do, or was it merely a portal through which digital savvy liberals could finally see it happening?

 

The 2012 Obama campaign used Facebook to identify every single one of its voters. According to the reports hailing them as digital masterminds, the campaign strategists hoovered up so much user-data that they “blew through an alarm that the engineers [of Facebook] hadn’t planned for or knew about.” But the Facebook engineers would “sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’”

 

It was only when Cambridge Analytica engaged in much smaller, less intrusive political research and action on social media in 2016, helping to propel the Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns, that social media was seen as a problem that needed to be solved.

 

In the following year Facebook would cite threats of foreign “disinformation” as a policy to disallow Irish anti-abortion campaigners from launching their social-media campaign ahead of a national referendum on the question. Facebook never explained what this foreign threat was. This is the model of intervention that then came to America in 2020: When a news story unfavorable to the Democratic candidate came to light, 50 unnamed retired intel officers — and Obama’s former CIA chief — could sign a letter saying that the story seemed like disinformation to them and quickly burn it in a digital memory hole until after the election.

 

The real dilemma for Obama is that his progressive worldview makes him a poor fit as a defender of small-d democracy. Like most progressives, he views himself and the class to which he belongs as a kind of moral vanguard. And he views the masses as suggestible bigots, always on the edge of being triggered to great violence by the presentation of the wrong word or fact.

 

Sometimes in his political career, he has paid patronizing respect to this view of the bigoted masses by just lying to them, explaining that he thinks God is involved in marriage and therefore same-sex couples can have no part of it. That this was a child’s view of how moral theology works, totally inconsistent with a mind supple enough to read and appreciate Niebuhr, was part of the point.

 

Like so many other progressives, what Obama seeks to restore is the near-monopoly liberals once had on the information space. He hearkened back repeatedly to the benefits of the old media system, controlled by three networks. I’m not surprised that Obama longs for the country to have a shared set of facts put forth by men like Dan Rather.

 

But to save democracy, Obama’s solution is a class of experts — some employed as moderators within Big Tech companies, and others as active regulators outside of them. As with all progressive ideas for reform, it is another jobs program for liberal-arts graduates.