Obama Warns About Impact of Fake News On Democracies

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Punita V
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During an address in Ottawa Former U.S. president Barack Obama warned about the effects of fake news on democracies around the world and said societies need to have a conversation about how online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, can help users better identify what is true from what is not.

Mr. Obama made the remarks during an arm-chair-style discussion before an audience of 12,000 people in Ottawa Friday night. He said democracies have only had "episodic” discussions about misinformation and must work with social-media platforms to find ways to preserve some “core social good” online.

“The marketplace of ideas that is the basis of our democratic practice has difficulty working if we don’t have some common baseline of what’s true and what’s not,” Mr. Obama said during the hour-long event at the Canadian Tire Centre.

“I know personally the people who created and run Facebook and Google and all the big social-media platforms that we have now and I think that the amount of power they now have, as essentially a common carrier of ideas, it means that there has to be some sort of collective conversation about how that works.”

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Mr. Obama’s speaking engagement was hosted by Canada 2020, an influential think tank with close ties to the Liberal government. The former president spoke extensively about the impact of digital platforms − positive and negative − in democracies during a conversation with Tobi Lutke, CEO of Ottawa-based e-commerce company Shopify.

For instance, Mr. Obama said the internet has played an important role in holding world leaders to account.

“It used to be that if there was a massacre, an ethnic cleansing, on the other side of the world, in Asia, it might be on page four of The New York Times,” Mr. Obama said. “Now, we’re mindful of cruelty and disaster and problems that are taking place in almost instantaneous time. I think that puts pressure on leaders because it means people say ‘what are you doing about that?’ ”

Mr. Obama’s trip to Ottawa comes one day after U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence visited the capital, marking the highest-level visit from a U.S. official to Canada since President Donald Trump took office.

 

 

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