Obama blames social networks for 'declining democracies'
In his Thursday speech, former US President Barack Obama accused major social media platforms of greatly amplifying the "worst instincts of humanity", despite acknowledging that he would not have been elected without these networks, stressing the need to regulate them.
"One of the main reasons democracies are weak is the profound change in our ways of communicating and being informed," Obama told students at Stanford University in California's Silicon Valley.
The Democratic leader admitted that he "may not have been elected" as president without sites such as "MySpace" and Facebook, speaking of the useful work in terms of awareness and mobilization that activists are doing all over the world through social networks.
However, he especially talked about the other side of the success of Facebook or YouTube, whose economic model is based on the economy of attention through large-scale targeted advertising.
"Unfortunately, it's the intriguing and polarizing content that attracts attention and encourages engagement" of users, he said.
The former president (2009-2017) also addressed the phenomenon of disinformation, saying that he did not sufficiently realize "to what extent we have become tolerant of lies and conspiracy theories" before the election of his successor Donald Trump.
He added that Russian President Vladimir "Putin did not do this. He did not need to. We did it ourselves," referring to campaigns of voter manipulation that Russia is behind.
"We have seen an incumbent president who denies clear electoral results and helps incite a violent rebellion against the nation's capital," he said, referring to Trump, who did not recognize the victory of his successor Joe Biden and encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an incident that killed a number of people. persons.
And he considered that "this should be a wake-up call for us to take action."
Obama called for the laws governing social media to be reformed to become more accountable and transparent, explaining that the problem at the heart of misinformation is not "what people post" as much as "the content these platforms promote."
He saw this as proof that they were not "neutral" and that algorithms should be subject to security checks by a regulatory body, similar to cars, food and other consumer products.
Obama enumerated a series of values that he believed should guide the control of content, such as the promotion of democracy and respect for differences.
He concluded, "Tools do not control us. We can control them."
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