OBAMA: The new media landscape 'means everything is true and nothing is true'
APBarack Obama.President Obama is really, really worried about the spread of fake news in places like Facebook.
In a new profile of Obama in The New Yorker, David Remnick describes a scene where the president "talked almost obsessively" about a BuzzFeed article that explained how a small Macedonian town was pumping out fake news on Facebook for profit.
Obama told Remnick that the new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true … An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers' payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal-that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation."
Obama characterized this as different from how we engaged with democracy and politics in the past.
"Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that's what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us," he told The New Yorker. "And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That's how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you'd argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don't have that."
We can't agree on the basic facts.
This isn't the first time the president has riffed on this idea. In a speech on Thursday, he talked about how damaging the spread of deliberate misinformation can be on Facebook.
"If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not, and particularly in an age of social media, where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems," Obama said.
Facebook, for its part, has denied that fake news on its platform influenced the election in any way.
"Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook - it's a very small amount of the content - influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a recent press conference.
But Obama's worry about the effect fake news can have has some data backing it up. A recent study by BuzzFeed showed that in the lead-up to the election, the top fake-news stories on Facebook outperformed legitimate news stories shared by some of the most popular media companies.