He knows that he would not have been elected without social networks, but today he is calling for them to be regulated: former US President Barack Obama gave a speech on Thursday April 21 in which he accused the major platforms of having vastly amplified
"mankind's worst instincts"
.
"One of the major causes of the weakening of democracies is the profound change in the way we communicate and inform ourselves
," he told students at Stanford, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley. in California.
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The Democratic leader acknowledged that he
“may not have been elected”
without sites like MySpace or Facebook, and spoke of the beneficial work of awareness-raising and mobilization carried out by activists around the world, via the networks .
But above all, he detailed the flip side of the success of Facebook or YouTube, whose business model – large-scale targeted advertising – is based on the attention economy.
“Unfortunately, it is inflammatory, polarizing content that grabs attention and drives engagement”
from users, he noted.
"Alarm bell"
The former head of state (2009-2017) also dwelt on the phenomenon of disinformation, and blamed himself for not having sufficiently realized
“how receptive we had become to lies and conspiracy theories
before the election of Donald Trump, who succeeded him
.
“Putin didn't do that.
He didn't need.
We did it to ourselves
,” he added, referring to the voter manipulation campaigns orchestrated from Russia.
'We just saw a sitting president deny clear election results and help incite a violent insurgency against the nation's capital'
, he asserted, in reference to Donald Trump, who did not recognize the victory of Joe Biden at the end of 2020, and encouraged his supporters before the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which left several dead.
“It must be our alarm bell to react.”
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Barack Obama therefore called for a reform of the laws that govern social networks, so that they are more responsible and more transparent, explaining that the problem at the heart of misinformation was less
"what people publish"
than
"the content that these platforms promote”
.
The proof according to him that they are not
"neutral"
and that the algorithms should be subject to security checks by a regulatory authority, in the same way as cars, food and other consumer products.
He then detailed a series of values that he believes should guide content moderation, such as strengthening democracy and respecting differences.
“The tools don't control us.
We can control them
,” he concluded.
