Obama copied speech how to#

Introducing the former president was Michael McFaul, director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and U.S. “If we do nothing, I’m convinced the trends that we’re seeing will get worse,” he said. Obama told a packed audience of more than 600 people in CEMEX auditorium – as well as more than 250,000 viewers tuning in online – that everyone is part of the solution to make democracy stronger in the digital age and that all of us – from technology companies and their employees to students and ordinary citizens – must work together to adapt old institutions and values to a new era of information.

Stanford scholars from across the social sciences are studying the threats disinformation poses to democracy.

Obama copied speech how to#

Social Sciences What to know about disinformation and how to address it The event brought together people working in technology, policy, and academia for panel discussions on topics ranging from the role of government in establishing online trust, the relationship between democracy and tech companies, and the threat of digital authoritarians. Obama, who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, was the keynote speaker at a one-day symposium, titled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm,” co-hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation on the Stanford campus on April 21. “This is an opportunity, it’s a chance that we should welcome for governments to take on a big important problem and prove that democracy and innovation can coexist,” Obama said. Over the course of an hour-long address, Obama outlined the threat that disinformation online, including deepfake technology powered by AI, poses to democracy as well as ways he thought the problems might be addressed in the United States and abroad. President Barack Obama delivered a keynote address about how information is created and consumed, and the threat that disinformation poses to democracy. Whether anyone will hear Obama’s insights or not is another matter, but given the stakes, our possibly terminally distorted information landscape is certainly still worth talking about.Former U.S. Nonetheless, the political figure who presided over the rise of Big Tech does seem keen to sound the alarm about the existential threat that online misinformation poses to democratic society. Obama’s commonsense, non-partisan ideas about how to transform tech will likely still prove polarizing, particularly among the crowd that propagated racist conspiracy theories about the former president - an onslaught of untruth that ultimately presaged the coming explosion of political misinformation. Ultimately while Obama’s Stanford speech was a concise and thoughtful summary of the ways that social media is fraying modern society, it’s one unlikely to make any converts.

That piece of bipartisan legislation would require social platforms to open up their data to outside researchers. He also pointed to possible reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content, and mentioned the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act by name. While the former president stopped short of digging into policy specifics, he did point to sweeping European regulatory initiatives like the Digital Markets Act as one path forward. Throughout an hourlong speech, Obama framed misinformation, harassment and other issues that plague social networks as the result of platforms designed with all the wrong incentives in place - incentives that wind up “turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses.” They’re also the result of very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet, generally, and social media platforms in particular.” “Not all problems we are seeing now are an inevitable byproduct of this new technology. Obama emphasized that while we’re reaping what social media companies have sown, it may not be too late to make different choices.