Barack Obama on Disinformation and The Future of Democracy

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Speaker 1 For all the times we didn't live up to our ideals, for all the times that we've made mistakes on the international stage, if we get democracy right, democracy is stronger around the globe.

Speaker 1 And when we don't get it right or we don't look like we care about it, others fill that gap.

Speaker 3 This is Radio Atlantic.

Speaker 3 I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Speaker 3 I recently interviewed President Barack Obama to talk about disinformation, what it is, how it threatens our democracy here in America and in countries around the world, and how it can be countered.

Speaker 3 The very tools that helped pro-democracy movements around the world and opened the public square to new and interesting voices are now used to disseminate disinformation, undermining our democratic institutions.

Speaker 3 Nowhere is the assault on democracy more evident at this moment than in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin is attempting to demolish Ukraine's democracy and Ukraine itself.

Speaker 3 Throughout this aggression, we've witnessed the wholesale suppression of information, as well as the use of disinformation as an effective tactic of war.

Speaker 3 In this live conversation taped at the University of Chicago, I talked with President Obama about how we define disinformation and what to make of its weaponization around the globe.

Speaker 3 We started our conversation by talking about the war in Ukraine and the role disinformation plays in deceiving the Russian people.

Speaker 3 Before we go directly into the subject of disinformation, there's a lot to cover.

Speaker 3 I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about Ukraine, where we are right now, and something that I think everybody here would appreciate

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 the chance to hear you talk about this through the prism of your knowledge of Vladimir Putin. You spent a lot of time with him, a lot of time grappling with him.

Speaker 3 Spend a couple of minutes, if you can,

Speaker 3 explaining where we are and where you think this is headed.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it is a tragedy of historic proportions. That's not news to people here.
You can see it.

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 it is calling the question

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 a set of trends around the world that we've seen building for some time. Putin

Speaker 1 represented a very particular

Speaker 1 reaction

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 the ideals of democracy, but also globalization, the collision of cultures,

Speaker 1 the ability to harness anger and resentment around

Speaker 1 ethno-nationalist mythology.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what we're seeing is the consequences

Speaker 1 of that kind of toxic mix

Speaker 1 in the hands of an autocratic government that doesn't have a lot of checks and balances.

Speaker 1 I think it is also fair to say that it is

Speaker 1 a bracing reminder for democracies

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 had gotten flabby

Speaker 1 and confused and

Speaker 1 feckless around the stakes of things that

Speaker 1 we tended to take for granted.

Speaker 1 Including democracy, yes, rule of law, freedom of press and conscience

Speaker 1 of the sort that one of your previous speakers

Speaker 1 represents, that you have to fight for that information, or you have to fight to provide people the information they need to be free and self-governing,

Speaker 1 that it doesn't just happen inevitably. Independent judiciaries making elections work in ways that are fair and free.

Speaker 1 We have gotten complacent, And I think that

Speaker 1 I cannot guarantee that as a consequence of what's happened, we are shaking off that complacency. I will say that as somebody who grappled with the incursion into Crimea and

Speaker 1 the eastern portions of Ukraine,

Speaker 1 I have been encouraged by the European reaction because in 2014

Speaker 1 I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways that we would have wanted to

Speaker 1 see from

Speaker 1 those of us who describe ourselves as

Speaker 1 Western democracies.

Speaker 1 In terms of Putin and where he takes this, there's been a lot of literature about this, a lot of reporting about this.

Speaker 1 I don't know

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 the person I knew is the same as the person who is now leading this charge.

Speaker 1 He was always ruthless.

Speaker 1 You witnessed what he did in Chechnya. He had no qualms about crushing those who he considered a threat.
That's not new.

Speaker 1 For him to bet the farm in this way

Speaker 1 I'm not

Speaker 1 I would not have necessarily predicted from him five years ago.

Speaker 1 How much of that is, you know, there've been speculation of the psychology of how much of that is him aging, him being isolated during COVID, et cetera.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 as much as I think we cannot count on sudden rationality from him,

Speaker 1 and as disquieting as

Speaker 1 the absolute control of information within Russia makes me doubtful about

Speaker 1 any kind of grassroots or oligarch resistance to the current course of events.

Speaker 1 I think that what has happened in Ukraine in many ways is more remarkable than, or less predictable, than Putin wanting to seize terrorism.

Speaker 3 You mean the high level of resistance?

Speaker 1 The high level of resistance, the degree to which you have somebody like a Zelensky responding to the moment.

Speaker 1 part of what changed between 2014 and today is that I think a sense of national identity continued to fortify itself.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 ironically,

Speaker 1 him lopping off,

Speaker 1 at least informally, annexing

Speaker 1 Crimea and portions on the east, I think, clarified within Ukraine

Speaker 1 who they were and what they stood for.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I also think the thing that he did not fully anticipate is the degree to which the nature of war has changed, where everybody is seeing exactly what is happening

Speaker 1 on a real-time basis. And all those things, I think, may lead to,

Speaker 1 I won't say a happy resolution, but I think will

Speaker 1 has the potential potential of preventing a maximalist victory for Putin. And that

Speaker 1 over the long term may

Speaker 1 allow for an independent Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Two more quick things on this. Do you think that Ukraine can win by your definition of what win might be?

Speaker 1 I mean, you look at these cities and you look at the populations and you look at the exodus.

Speaker 1 It's hard to describe that as a win.

Speaker 1 And I think it's too early to tell what an end game looks like.

Speaker 1 I would not try to predict not only what's in the minds of Putin, but also

Speaker 1 how the Ukrainians conceive of this struggle, because we are sitting here comfortably and they are going through heck.

Speaker 1 And I,

Speaker 1 you know, the one thing I try not to do is to project onto them what they should do, how we should define

Speaker 1 what's tolerable, what the nature of their resistance should look like, how, if negotiations proceed, those should proceed. I think what we can do is support them and their efforts and their courage.

Speaker 1 And I think the other thing that we can do is

Speaker 1 take this as

Speaker 1 a lesson that sadly they're paying the price for, but that

Speaker 1 speaks to a much more

Speaker 1 bumpy, difficult, violent, challenging future for the coming generation if we don't

Speaker 1 get some things right here at home, in Europe, and in Asia, in Latin America, because these are not

Speaker 1 what's happening, there is not isolated.

Speaker 1 What we're seeing is a reversion back to old ways of thinking about power and

Speaker 1 place and identity.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think part of our complacency grew out of the notion that once the Berlin Wall fell and Mandela was released and the world was flat and

Speaker 1 you had McDonald's everywhere and now suddenly

Speaker 1 that was it. And we were done.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we forgot that that

Speaker 1 post-World War II 50-year stretch to 60-year stretch, that's the anomaly, right?

Speaker 1 And that there is millennia

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 brutality and

Speaker 1 pillage and violence and displacement and cruelty.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we created a set of institutions out of 60 million people dying in World War II and tried to reconfigure

Speaker 1 how we might organize our societies, but it is not self-executing, right? It's something that

Speaker 1 we have to continually nurture and respond to new circumstances, whether that's changes in technology, changes in globalization, climate change, all those things require us to say, all right, what does that mean

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 our capacity to maintain human dignity and freedom and self-governance?

Speaker 1 And that's the prism through which we should be examining these questions and being willing to modify, adjust, reform our institutions to keep up with that.

Speaker 1 And that's something that I think we have not done as well as we need to.

Speaker 3 One last question on this.

Speaker 3 Back in 2013, 2014,

Speaker 3 if you can go back and do things over again, would you have done more to

Speaker 3 work against Putin's aims in Donbass in Crimea?

Speaker 3 I remember you and McCain going at it in various points.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I actually don't

Speaker 1 because the circumstances were different.

Speaker 1 The populations in Crimea

Speaker 1 certainly, and their attitudes towards Russia were different, which is why you did not have

Speaker 1 to have

Speaker 1 a full-scale invasion.

Speaker 1 The East East was more complicated, and we had a very robust response that, as I said, required a lot of work with the Europeans in order to mount.

Speaker 1 And Ukraine itself was different. I mean, keep in mind that you had just had essentially a strong man who was

Speaker 1 aligned with Putin.

Speaker 1 And we had had to intervene to prevent a massacre in the Medan.

Speaker 1 The Rada still had elements that were

Speaker 1 linked to the old order.

Speaker 1 And so for us to check at least

Speaker 1 his efforts for eight years,

Speaker 1 I think was

Speaker 1 what we needed to do at the time. The notion that

Speaker 1 we were also con

Speaker 1 We were also concerned about making sure that we did not give an excuse for a further incursion.

Speaker 1 And a lot of the arguments back then had to do with arming Ukraine,

Speaker 1 which in turn

Speaker 1 could have provided those kinds of excuses, and you had issues of training. Anyway,

Speaker 1 if you ask me what I'm

Speaker 1 most concerned about when I think back towards the end of my presidency,

Speaker 1 It probably has more to do with the topic here today.

Speaker 1 It's something I grappled with a lot during my presidency. I saw it sort of unfold, and that is the degree to which

Speaker 1 information,

Speaker 1 disinformation, misinformation was being weaponized.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we saw it,

Speaker 1 but I think I underestimated the degree to which

Speaker 1 democracies were as vulnerable to it as they were, including ours.

Speaker 3 Well, let me ask you about something notable that's happening in Russia, which is that despite a somewhat porous internet, globalization, everything else, most Russians, from what we understand from reporting, seem to have very little idea that Ukraine is not the aggressor nation, that it's not run by neo-Nazis,

Speaker 3 and so on. And so my question for you has to do with how do you break through to authoritarian regimes or populations controlled by authoritarians to

Speaker 3 give them your understanding of reality, democracy's understanding of reality.

Speaker 1 Well, I don't think we have an easy solution. I mean, we have courageous journalists.
You saw a woman with a handheld sign

Speaker 1 go across the TV screen saying this is all a lie. And

Speaker 1 that obviously got suppressed quickly.

Speaker 1 Here's one way to think about it, though.

Speaker 1 For all the flaws that may exist

Speaker 1 in our own society, You can get any information you want right now. It's in your pocket.
Or some of you are taking pictures, so it's right in front of you.

Speaker 1 Unfiltered,

Speaker 1 literally, there's nothing you cannot receive right now in this room.

Speaker 1 And yet, in our society, you have currently

Speaker 1 roughly 40%

Speaker 1 of the country that

Speaker 1 appears convinced that the current president

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 elected fraudulently and that the election was rigged.

Speaker 1 And you have 30% to

Speaker 1 35%

Speaker 1 of the country that

Speaker 1 has chosen not to avail itself of

Speaker 1 a medical miracle.

Speaker 1 the development of a vaccine faster than anything we've ever seen before, which by the way, now has been clinically tested by about a billion people,

Speaker 1 and yet are still refusing to take it despite extraordinary risks to themselves and their families. So, if that's true in our society, imagine

Speaker 1 you know, how any of us would process information if

Speaker 1 we are not getting,

Speaker 1 if we're not seeing anything else, right?

Speaker 1 I have to be careful. The reason I'm pausing is I'm about to tell a dad joke.

Speaker 1 And so I'm sure my daughters, if they see this, will roll their eyes. But

Speaker 1 it's like the old story of the old fish is swimming by a couple of young fish, and he moseys past them, and he says,

Speaker 1 How's the water?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he keeps on swimming, and

Speaker 1 one of the young fish looks at the other and says, What's water?

Speaker 1 And I think that

Speaker 1 that's how we are in terms of information.

Speaker 1 We don't know what we don't know.

Speaker 1 It's very difficult for us to get out of

Speaker 1 the reality that is constructed for us.

Speaker 1 And that is part of the reason why the stakes of this issue are so important

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 it is difficult for me to see how

Speaker 1 we

Speaker 1 we win the contest of ideas

Speaker 1 if in fact we are not able to

Speaker 1 agree on a baseline of facts that allow the marketplace of ideas to work.

Speaker 3 I want to stay in this and I want to sort of level set on some definitions.

Speaker 3 I just want to note for the record that that joke was 40% too epistemologically sophisticated to count as a dad joke, by the way.

Speaker 3 I have dad jokes we can do in our second hour, but

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 go to definitions.

Speaker 1 Let's just start there.

Speaker 3 What is the difference? between disinformation.

Speaker 3 I'm asking you this as a retired politician who uses facts or used facts to your advantage,

Speaker 3 your electoral advantage. What's the difference between disinformation and information that's narratively inconvenient? Let's say

Speaker 3 how do you define disinformation, misinformation?

Speaker 1 I don't think the definitions are that tough.

Speaker 1 Misinformation is just wrong information. And

Speaker 1 that's always been with us.

Speaker 1 We get facts wrong, we say stuff wrong,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 we're not going to solve

Speaker 1 for that problem

Speaker 1 anytime soon.

Speaker 1 The way I define disinformation is if you have a

Speaker 1 systematic effort

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 either promote

Speaker 1 false

Speaker 1 information,

Speaker 1 to suppress true information

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 the purpose of political gain, financial gain,

Speaker 1 enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don't like.

Speaker 1 And that, I think, is entirely different from information that

Speaker 1 is inconvenient.

Speaker 1 If you're asking, Jeff,

Speaker 1 I'll use an example

Speaker 1 because I think it also shows that sometimes

Speaker 1 we get too cute about this, and we're not operating on common sense.

Speaker 1 I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Speaker 1 There's a clipping there of me in the newspaper, dated 1961.

Speaker 1 I walked by the hospital every day

Speaker 1 for the first several years of my life.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so that's an example.

Speaker 1 That wasn't an example of people being misinformed.

Speaker 1 There was a agenda behind that

Speaker 1 promotion of what was clearly a false fact.

Speaker 1 I was identified as having engaged in

Speaker 1 a political falsehood when I said

Speaker 1 we just celebrated the Affordable Care Act passage at the White House.

Speaker 1 I wasn't looking to milk any applause, but

Speaker 1 during the run-up to passage,

Speaker 1 in a speech before

Speaker 1 the AMA, I think, I said that,

Speaker 1 and repeated several times, that

Speaker 1 if you want to keep your doctor, you can.

Speaker 1 And the point we were trying to make is 85% of people had health care. One of the big problems in trying to get health care for the uninsured is making sure that folks who

Speaker 1 already had it didn't feel like

Speaker 1 you know scare tactics, weren't vulnerable to scare tactics that they were all going to be rationed and socialized medicine and they'd lose their plan to doctor.

Speaker 1 And we said, look, we're keeping the system for folks who have employer-based healthcare intact.

Speaker 1 Once we passed it

Speaker 1 and we were starting to implement, one of the the things that we had done is to raise

Speaker 1 standards for what insurance could or could not provide because there was a bunch of phony insurance on the marketplace

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 people thought they were purchasing insurance, but it turned out that when they actually got sick, there were so many restrictions to it, it didn't do them any good.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there was constant churn in this market. So

Speaker 1 when people were up for renewal for these ultra-cheap insurance plans that didn't actually provide coverage, the standard we had set,

Speaker 1 it turned out they couldn't renew because those plans were no longer being offered. Well,

Speaker 1 many mainstream reporters, not just

Speaker 1 Fox News,

Speaker 1 said, look, he lied. You lost your insurance that you had and you were perfectly satisfied with.

Speaker 1 And I thought, well, I guess technically it's true that you no longer had the plan you had because the bogus plans that you used to pay for that offered you no protection when you actually finally got sick, we regulated out of existence.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 was deemed as a as a, you know, I hadn't been accurate. That was was one of the few times during my presidency where you know everybody gave four pinocchios on Obama

Speaker 1 that's an example of what can happen in politics and by the way although I promise you I cursed a lot in the Oval Office when I read people saying that I'd been mistruthful or I hadn't been truthful because

Speaker 1 The basic principle I had laid out I meant and was true, but I couldn't really complain about people criticizing me for it, and that's okay. But

Speaker 1 that was not a matter of us.

Speaker 1 Let me put it this way.

Speaker 1 Me saying that was not a threat to democracy. It was not

Speaker 1 intended to somehow

Speaker 1 subvert

Speaker 1 the democratic process. And because

Speaker 1 people could then criticize me for it, the democratic process worked. That's how

Speaker 1 the marketplace is supposed to work in theory.

Speaker 3 Can I ask you a meta question? Not a Zuckerberg meta question, a meta meta question.

Speaker 1 No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Have you been holding that joke for

Speaker 1 three seconds?

Speaker 3 Seriously, it just happens. It's spontaneous.

Speaker 3 No, no, no. The meta question is prompted by your statement here.
I'm wondering, given what you understand about the information environment, no one has

Speaker 3 been afflicted by some negative aspects of this current information environment like you have, the birth certificate being one example.

Speaker 3 You just kind of sort of admitted that maybe you didn't tell the whole truth or you shared something that was inaccurate, and you just shared that publicly.

Speaker 3 Are you worried tomorrow that Fox News is going to say

Speaker 3 Obama admits he lied about ACA or about keeping your own?

Speaker 1 I am now that you just said it that way.

Speaker 1 Because that is not.

Speaker 1 I'm not trying to. Let's be clear, that is not at all.
I thought I was making the exact opposite point.

Speaker 1 This is how the press works, even in a democracy. Yeah.
And by the way,

Speaker 1 even with an award-winning magazine editor. No, that is actually.

Speaker 3 To make it meta-meta, Brian Stelter is sitting over there already typing how he's going to report on this meta-moment.

Speaker 1 That is not the point I was making. I'm just asking that.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. I'm asking a serious question about that.
And I'm going to respond. The point I was making is that

Speaker 1 the reason I brought up the point is that in a democracy,

Speaker 1 there are going to be,

Speaker 1 in the normal course of debate,

Speaker 1 we will contest

Speaker 1 what's been said, what's been promised, what's been delivered,

Speaker 1 and there will be some play in the joints in terms of how we interpret stuff.

Speaker 1 I actually, to this day, believe that what I said was accurate, which is when you say you can keep your doctor, if your doctor dropped dead tomorrow, that is not the fault of the Affordable Care Act.

Speaker 1 Technically speaking, you did not keep your doctor. You had to find a new one.

Speaker 1 So I was making a broader point, which is that

Speaker 1 systematically, we are not forcing you out of existing

Speaker 1 employer-based health care, which is what people

Speaker 1 at an aggregate level are concerned about.

Speaker 1 But the reason I told that story is to illustrate that, yes, there are still going to be disputes around what's true and false, even in a well-functioning democracy and a free press. That is okay.

Speaker 1 I was going to the point you were making, what's the difference between systematic disinformation, whether it's by the state or by product design

Speaker 1 on internet platforms,

Speaker 1 that are different in kind

Speaker 1 and are destructive in different ways.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 just to go back to basics,

Speaker 1 if you think about our our constitutional design, and obviously

Speaker 1 even each democracy

Speaker 1 has sort of a different coding for how their democracy is supposed to work. But in our design,

Speaker 1 the theory is you have First Amendment, you have freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press,

Speaker 1 and everybody has a say.

Speaker 1 And in that marketplace, then we're going to sort out what's true and what's false, or what's best for us, how we act collectively, and so forth.

Speaker 1 In reality, as we all know, some voices have been louder than others, some voices were excluded entirely. But we did come to a point, let's call it post-World War II.

Speaker 1 Because prior to that, you know, sometimes we have a rosy

Speaker 1 nostalgia about the past, and you have Father Cocklin, and you have the McCarthy era, and you've got

Speaker 1 the treatment of black people and brown people generally.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 but at least after World War II,

Speaker 1 you had enough of a consensus that we built both a set of standards within journalism and we built a set of regulatory

Speaker 1 guidelines that industries had to follow.

Speaker 1 And it was possible then to have a debate between the left and the right

Speaker 1 in which we differed strongly on process or on substance, but we agreed on process.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what we've seen is a breakdown of

Speaker 1 that consensus.

Speaker 1 And what we've seen is

Speaker 1 a shift in technology. and who controls these platforms in ways that are not transparent.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that has contributed to, aggravated,

Speaker 1 a sense in which we are no longer operating by the same rules or on the same facts.

Speaker 3 I want to come to that because Maria Ressa talked very effectively about these questions about what the platform is.

Speaker 1 But let me,

Speaker 3 there's a story that you have told.

Speaker 3 Over the course of your career, you wrote it.

Speaker 1 It was in the volume one of your autobiography.

Speaker 3 When is volume two coming, by the way?

Speaker 1 Let's move on. Okay.

Speaker 3 It's the story. It's a story.

Speaker 3 It's kind of an Iowa story, but it's also a downstate Illinois story.

Speaker 3 You talk about entering politics as a black politician, black Democratic politician of Chicago with a name like yours, getting a fair shake downstate. No, no, that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 it's a great story, and I think you should tell about newspapers. I think it speaks to the evolution of press and information and how it reflects

Speaker 1 on politics.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Axel Rodder will remember this

Speaker 1 because he was, let's face it, he was highly skeptical about the idea of me running for the U.S. Senate two years after 9-11 with a name that rhymed with Osama.

Speaker 1 And I can't fault him for that.

Speaker 1 So I'm going down to downstate Illinois, and those of you who know downstate Illinois, it's conservative. It's rural, it is conservative,

Speaker 1 98% white some of these counties.

Speaker 1 And I'd drive around and I

Speaker 1 for you young people, there were these things called maps that you had to unfold and it was really hard to fold them back. And

Speaker 1 so you'd swing into a town

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I'd typically stop we'd we'd arrange for me to stop by

Speaker 1 the local newspaper and usually you'd have sort of a

Speaker 1 stereotype but more than once

Speaker 1 bow tie crew cut, glasses,

Speaker 1 look at you kind of skeptically, come on in, you want some coffee, would organize a little roundtable with the reporters,

Speaker 1 and you'd sit there and you'd answer questions and bat some ideas around and explain why you were running for the Senate.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 typically the next day, there would be

Speaker 1 a little article because these are small towns, so there wasn't much going on. So

Speaker 1 even though nobody knew who I was, they'd still report on it. And And they'd say, well, you know, this young man came down,

Speaker 1 a little liberal for our taste,

Speaker 1 funny name,

Speaker 1 but he had some okay ideas. And he's running for Senate.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that was the extent of the filter that I was dealing with. And so then I'm going to the fish fryer or the VFW hall

Speaker 1 or the county fair. And

Speaker 1 people might still be a little suspicious of a black civil rights lawyer from Chicago and whether they can connect with him.

Speaker 1 But I could get a fair hearing.

Speaker 1 There weren't a set of

Speaker 1 impenetrable assumptions about who I was.

Speaker 1 And as a consequence, I could win those counties, which I did.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if I went there today,

Speaker 1 I could not.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 let me take myself out of the equation because obviously I'm such an object of,

Speaker 1 you know, people may have some fixed opinions at this point, I think it's fair to say.

Speaker 1 But someone like me going downstate or traveling through Iowa,

Speaker 1 they would have to work through a different set of barriers because... That newspaper probably doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 It's been replaced, by the way, not just by Fox in every barbershop and beauty salon or Sinclair local news, but it's also been replaced now with digital community newsletters that are being

Speaker 1 manufactured, printed out, and just pumped into these communities as local journalism has frayed.

Speaker 1 And by the way,

Speaker 1 I don't think there's

Speaker 1 an equivalence necessarily on the left and the right in terms of the media space, but I suspect it is also harder to get a hearing if you are a rural guy coming up to Chicago

Speaker 1 that doesn't check every box with respect to certain issues. Certainly if you're a conservative Democrat, let's say, who is coming up here running in a primary.
So

Speaker 1 that I think is an indication of how things have changed.

Speaker 1 And by the way, there was just recently a report

Speaker 1 that confirms what I feel and what I've seen, and anecdotally, it's just one study that was done. Interesting study, though.

Speaker 1 They paid a pretty large cohort of Fox News watchers to watch CNN for a certain period of time.

Speaker 1 Do you see this? And

Speaker 1 it was

Speaker 1 and these are very

Speaker 1 hardcore conservatives,

Speaker 1 not Biden voters, not central

Speaker 1 sort of swing voters. These were folks who watch

Speaker 1 Hannity and Tucker Carlson and so forth.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 after a relatively short period of time, what it showed was that

Speaker 1 their views on issues, controversial issues like immigration or police or vaccinations, had changed by 5, 8, 10%.

Speaker 1 Just simply by changing their diet.

Speaker 1 It hadn't turned them into liberals. It didn't make them want to vote for Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 They had just had access to a different set of information.

Speaker 1 And so I say that to suggest that

Speaker 1 I think we underestimate the degree of pliability

Speaker 1 in our opinions and our views.

Speaker 1 And what that means,

Speaker 1 I take that as hopeful,

Speaker 1 not in the

Speaker 1 not in the sense that the divisions that we see in our democracy of race, of region, of faith, of identity,

Speaker 1 those

Speaker 1 are there.

Speaker 1 They are not creations of social media. They are not creations of any particular network.

Speaker 1 They're deeply rooted and they're hard to work through. But it does give me faith that if people are given different information, they can process

Speaker 1 differently.

Speaker 1 And that the stories they tell themselves about who they are and their relationship to their neighbors, their friends, people who don't look like them, people who don't think like them, that those are

Speaker 1 subject to,

Speaker 1 well, to quote Lincoln,

Speaker 1 you can either encourage the better angels of folks' nature or their worst.

Speaker 1 And democracy is premised on the idea that we can come up with

Speaker 1 processes, including how we

Speaker 1 share information and argue about information that encourages our better agent. And I think that's possible.

Speaker 3 Let's stay on this newspaper question and journalism question, because this is not a natural disaster.

Speaker 3 I mean, yes, there have been unique pressures that tech companies have put on newspaper companies, but Alden Capital, for instance. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You guys did a great story about a venture capital firm that

Speaker 1 single-handedly scooped up and destroyed a whole bunch of newspapers in this country

Speaker 1 for profit.

Speaker 3 It's a man-made disaster in some cases. What is your specific recommendation

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 3 these news deserts that have been created across the country?

Speaker 3 And you could fold in the tech companies and responsibilities.

Speaker 1 Why don't I step back just for a second and maybe just share a couple of assumptions that I have

Speaker 1 in the interest of

Speaker 1 this transparency.

Speaker 1 Number one,

Speaker 1 as I said, I don't think that

Speaker 1 our media companies, our tech companies, social media created the divisions in our society. But

Speaker 1 I do think that what has happened in our media ecosystem is exacerbating and making democracy more difficult.

Speaker 1 Number two,

Speaker 1 I am

Speaker 1 close to a

Speaker 1 First Amendment absolutist. I believe in the idea of not just free speech, but also that you deal with bad speech with good speech, that you engage,

Speaker 1 that the exceptions to that are very narrow.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 particularly among this cohort of folks in college, and I've talked to my daughters about this,

Speaker 1 I don't want us to be such a society of manners that

Speaker 1 we feel like our feelings are hurt and we can't hear something that

Speaker 1 somebody says and and we wilt.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 think

Speaker 1 I want us all as citizens to be in the habit of being able to hear stuff that we disagree with and

Speaker 1 be able to answer with our words.

Speaker 1 Number three, I think that

Speaker 1 duplicating

Speaker 1 the consensus that we had post-World War II and you had three TV stations and

Speaker 1 newspapers

Speaker 1 in every major cities, in some cases, like Chicago, multiple newspapers,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 an FCC and all that. I think that's hard to duplicate, not just because of technology and the proliferation of content, but also because of the internationalization of content.

Speaker 1 That makes it more difficult.

Speaker 1 And number four,

Speaker 1 let's stipulate that there is no such thing as

Speaker 1 perfect objectivity.

Speaker 1 New York Times

Speaker 1 obviously chooses which stories to write and which reporters to hire, and they have certain perspectives that

Speaker 1 reflect itself in their newspaper, and even AP and

Speaker 1 Reuters and UPI, same thing. But

Speaker 1 along with that, I would also argue that

Speaker 1 there's things that are more true and things that are less true. That

Speaker 1 the basic ideas of

Speaker 1 checking sources and

Speaker 1 having multiple sources and fact checking and not reporting things that you just somebody just popped off and heard

Speaker 1 and the value of

Speaker 1 expertise and science, that that those things are important,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 And that I, you know,

Speaker 1 there are some areas

Speaker 1 that are not subject to fact-checking,

Speaker 1 and those are things we call opinions, or faith, or belief, and those are important too. Those speak to our emotions, but that is different from what in the public square we're supposed to be

Speaker 1 at least being able to find agreement on. So if I stipulate all that stuff, then what I would say is that

Speaker 1 the loss of journalism or local journalism, the nationalization of

Speaker 1 sort of a grievance anger-based journalism,

Speaker 1 the growth of social media and technology

Speaker 1 whose product design

Speaker 1 monetizes anger, resentment, conflict, division,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 in some cases makes people very vulnerable, right?

Speaker 1 This isn't just words, but can lead to violence. And, you know, and it's not just,

Speaker 1 you know, the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Speaker 1 It's not just

Speaker 1 in some far-off place, right?

Speaker 1 But can

Speaker 1 it if you are

Speaker 1 a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are a trans person right now in certain parts of this country, what's said matters.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what you now have is these product designs that are, and I think this was already said by Maria and others previously,

Speaker 1 in a non-transparent way that we don't have much insight to,

Speaker 1 a series of editorial choices are essentially being made

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 undermine our democracy,

Speaker 1 and oftentimes, when combined with

Speaker 1 any kind of ethno-nationalism or misogyny or racism can be fatal.

Speaker 1 And that is the media ecosystem that we now are occupying. And the good news is I actually think that it is

Speaker 1 at every juncture, every time you've had a new media, we've had this kind of churn, and then we've come up with rules. to try to figure out how do we

Speaker 1 fix it. But in order to fix it, we are going to have to have at least a consensus about what's our North Star.
What is the thing,

Speaker 1 the guiding principle around which we fix it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 my concern is right now that at least a portion of the country either isn't interested in fixing it or

Speaker 1 disagrees

Speaker 1 with what I would think our North Star should be, which is do we have a

Speaker 1 free, self-governing society based on democratic principles?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, let me ask a self-described near First Amendment absolutist, how would you very specifically want to regulate social media companies to make sure that they're not privileging anger, privileging division and polarization through their algorithms?

Speaker 1 So we've got a supply issue and we've got a demand issue for

Speaker 1 toxic information, right?

Speaker 1 And on the supply side, I do think that the tech companies are going to be increasingly the dominant players.

Speaker 1 They are private companies, which means that

Speaker 1 they are already making a range of decisions about not just what is on and or not on their platforms, but also what gets amplified and what does not.

Speaker 1 And I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then to put in place a combination of

Speaker 1 regulatory measures and

Speaker 1 industry norms

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 leave intact

Speaker 1 the opportunity for these platforms to make money,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 say

Speaker 1 to them that

Speaker 1 there's certain practices you engage in that we are not,

Speaker 1 we don't think are good for

Speaker 1 our society and we're going to discourage. And so a specific example would be

Speaker 1 there's been a lot of debate around Section 230.

Speaker 1 I don't know that

Speaker 1 entirely eliminating Section 230 protections from liability

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 necessary. I certainly think that providing Section 230 liability for paid advertising

Speaker 1 that is micro-targeting certain groups and we have no transparency into

Speaker 1 that that's not serving any

Speaker 1 particular

Speaker 1 benefit in terms of startups or innovation or so forth.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that can be really damaging.

Speaker 1 So I think that we have to have a set of debates around that.

Speaker 1 And there are smarter people than me who are working on this.

Speaker 1 The issue of anonymity and the distinction between bots and humans or

Speaker 1 bot farms and people who actually have opinions. Are there ways of sorting that out?

Speaker 1 In some circumstances, it's important to preserve anonymity in terms of so that there's space in repressive societies to discuss issues. But

Speaker 1 as we've all learned, it's a lot harder to be rude, obnoxious, cruel,

Speaker 1 or lie

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 somebody knows you're lying and knows who you are.

Speaker 1 And I think that there may be modifications there that can be made.

Speaker 1 So look,

Speaker 1 the one thing that's interesting, if you look at, for example, Facebook's response or Twitter's response or

Speaker 1 YouTube's response post-January 6th,

Speaker 1 they made a point of saying, well, we responded by doing a whole series of things,

Speaker 1 some of which then were reversed after the heat was off them,

Speaker 1 which tells me that

Speaker 1 they at least appear to have some insight into

Speaker 1 what's more likely to prompt insurrectionists, white supremacists,

Speaker 1 misogynist

Speaker 1 behavior on the internet, bullying behavior on the internet. They seem to know what it is.

Speaker 1 And I'm less interested in them in,

Speaker 1 and in fairness to them, many of them will acknowledge, we don't want to be policing

Speaker 1 everything that's said on the internet.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 what they haven't been forthcoming about is what their product designs are, and there are ways in which a democracy can rightly expect them to

Speaker 1 show us.

Speaker 1 If not us, then a group of researchers, if they have proprietary concerns, that can be managed. But to show us in the same way that on any other product,

Speaker 1 I don't know exactly how

Speaker 1 the inspections on meat are done.

Speaker 1 You know, and if somebody says, well, we have a proprietary technique to keep our meat clean, that's fine. Take it up with the meat inspector.
That's not my job.

Speaker 1 We can figure out how to, the same thing with carves, the same thing with toasters.

Speaker 1 This notion that somehow

Speaker 1 We have to preserve this information to

Speaker 1 ourselves because somehow

Speaker 1 we have proprietary interests. I think that's wrong.
Now, that's on the supply side. I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that

Speaker 1 we have to grapple with.

Speaker 1 And, you know,

Speaker 1 part of the reason I'm spending more time thinking about this through the foundation is because

Speaker 1 I work with young people from across the country and around the world who are working on on climate change, racial justice.

Speaker 1 Our goal in the foundation is to train the next generation of leaders and give them platforms and connections and make sure they're not isolated and that they're learning from each other across borders and

Speaker 1 regions.

Speaker 1 And uniformly, they're all confronting these issues about how do I deal with misinformation

Speaker 1 in my country, in my town? How do I get access to the public so that they know the facts that are affecting their lives about pollution or

Speaker 1 about how budgets are being distributed and so forth?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one of the things that

Speaker 1 we're learning is that

Speaker 1 they are hungry for a voice and for participation, but we haven't done a very good job in training this next generation

Speaker 1 to participate other than

Speaker 1 virtually

Speaker 1 and in a fairly shallow way. And part of,

Speaker 1 you know, there have been interesting studies

Speaker 1 showing that the single biggest predictor of whether you're a regular voter, et cetera, is, did you participate in

Speaker 1 student council, Boy Scouts, Girl Scout?

Speaker 1 And that's true for young people, it's true for all of us. The mediating institutions that used to lead us to be able to practice

Speaker 1 being involved and

Speaker 1 learning how do we debate and how do we vote and how do we then see results from collective decisions that we make.

Speaker 1 We're going to have to figure out ways to adapt that to virtual platforms because that's where people are going to meet and that's where people are going to be.

Speaker 1 And that may mean different ways of civic education,

Speaker 1 teaching critical thinking, finding better tools for participation

Speaker 1 on the internet. And that's all on the demand side.

Speaker 1 The good news is that we're seeing a lot of experiments being done. They just haven't been done to scale, which is why as wonderful as it is to see

Speaker 1 exercises in virtual democracy developing in various countries and towns,

Speaker 1 ways to get people to listen to each other and work together. We can't ignore the mega platforms that are out there because they're still

Speaker 1 dominating the space.

Speaker 3 Let me, you know, over the past couple of days, we've collected some questions for President Obama, and I want to throw two quick ones at you, and then

Speaker 3 a final question, a Maria Ressa-inspired question for you from me. This is from Anne Moss here at the University of Chicago.

Speaker 3 Was there a moment in your presidency you can identify when you or your advisors came to realize that social media itself posed a threat to American democracy? What was it?

Speaker 3 Was there a hinge moment when you just went, oh, what is happening here?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it's weird to remember that the smartphone came out in 2010.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's been

Speaker 1 12 years

Speaker 1 since this ubiquitous

Speaker 1 thing came out.

Speaker 1 And so for us, what we saw was:

Speaker 1 I think you can draw a direct line

Speaker 1 during our campaign,

Speaker 1 Sarah Palin

Speaker 1 Birtherism,

Speaker 1 death panels.

Speaker 1 There was

Speaker 1 what's been called truth decay, right?

Speaker 1 There was an erosion of

Speaker 1 what was considered acceptable to assert

Speaker 1 in the press period.

Speaker 1 That's all pre-social media. So what I did see was, I think, a

Speaker 1 erosion of accountability norms and standards

Speaker 1 in political life. And then when social media hits,

Speaker 1 then I think that

Speaker 1 you saw it spread and accelerate. But

Speaker 1 I wouldn't actually

Speaker 1 say that

Speaker 1 even by 2012, that social media was the main carrier. I think it was actually in my second term

Speaker 1 that you start seeing

Speaker 1 not just bad information, but you also start seeing an acceleration of

Speaker 1 misinformation. And by 2016, that's when

Speaker 1 I think it,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 we know what happened.

Speaker 1 Tell us. Well, please.

Speaker 1 One more question.

Speaker 3 This is from Connor Lee, who's a student here at the University of Chicago. And you've sort of touched on this, but it might be worth dilating on it for a second.

Speaker 3 What is your advice to young people who seek to play a part in protecting our elections and curbing the effects of disinformation on those elections?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I think young people are going to have to help us reinvent

Speaker 1 for a primarily virtual

Speaker 1 social media space,

Speaker 1 the same kinds of rules, norms, practices, processes that existed before. And

Speaker 1 I think that's going to take a while.

Speaker 1 But you are going to have a better idea of what works and what doesn't to encourage

Speaker 1 veracity,

Speaker 1 accountability,

Speaker 1 the ability to listen

Speaker 1 to people who you don't agree with, to create those spaces.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, through the foundation and other institutions, we're really soliciting from young people ideas and trying out a bunch of things.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think this is going to be

Speaker 1 it's going to take some time.

Speaker 1 I don't think this is a

Speaker 1 there are no silver bullet solutions to this, and I don't think that it's going to

Speaker 1 be solved in

Speaker 1 a year or two years or four years. I think this is building up the habits, the muscles of democracy that have atrophied is going to take some time.

Speaker 1 But I'll close with what I said before.

Speaker 1 If you ask me how I'm going to sort through what are a genuinely

Speaker 1 a set of genuinely difficult questions, technological questions, free speech questions.

Speaker 1 You know, how do we encourage citizens' questions? If you ask me,

Speaker 1 what's my guiding principle?

Speaker 1 My guiding principle is: does this make our democracy stronger or weaker?

Speaker 1 And when I say democracy, I don't just mean elections. Does this

Speaker 1 make

Speaker 1 a multiracial,

Speaker 1 vast, diverse

Speaker 1 country more likely to work together and to affirm basic notions of fairness, process,

Speaker 1 truth,

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 is it sending us in the reverse direction of

Speaker 1 tribalism,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 resentment, anger, division.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 that's what I'm thinking about. That's what I'm working on.
And the reason

Speaker 1 that it's important for us to get this right,

Speaker 1 you started with Ukraine, I'll end with Ukraine.

Speaker 1 This is an international trend.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the one thing I'm here to report on about America

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 for all the times we didn't live up to our ideals, for all the times that

Speaker 1 we've

Speaker 1 made mistakes on the international stage

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 been

Speaker 1 hypocritical in terms of how we applied our

Speaker 1 faith in democracy.

Speaker 1 If we get

Speaker 1 democracy right, democracy is stronger around the globe.

Speaker 1 And when we don't get it right, or we don't look like we care about it,

Speaker 1 others fill that gap.

Speaker 1 People, even our enemies, recognize that what happens here, if we can make a democracy function,

Speaker 1 where you look at this room

Speaker 1 and you've got people from every corner of the globe,

Speaker 1 every racial group, every ethnicity, every

Speaker 1 religion, every culture, that if we can figure out how to live together and treat each other with dignity and respect,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 others start feeling like, well, maybe it's possible

Speaker 1 in our country too.

Speaker 1 And when

Speaker 1 we look like we have abandoned those ideals or we're not willing to fight for them robustly,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 around the world, people start saying, see,

Speaker 1 that was always a pipe dream, and

Speaker 1 the Putins of the world

Speaker 1 have a much easier time.

Speaker 3 There are a dozen other subjects to talk about, but we're well out of time. And just a reminder that we're meeting here again at 9.
We have an amazing program tomorrow, and I want you all to come.

Speaker 3 But in the meantime, please join on behalf of David and the Institute of Politics and on behalf of the Atlantic, please join me in thanking President Obama for his time today.

Speaker 1 Thank you, everybody.

Speaker 4 This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rebecca Rashid with help from Emily Gottchak Marconi. Our executive producer is Claudina Baith.

Speaker 4 If you value what we're doing here at the Atlantic, please consider subscribing. You can watch the full coverage of the event at theatlantic.com/slash disinformation dash conference.

Speaker 4 A special thank you to the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.