Republicans, for their part, accuse the companies of suppressing free speech by censoring conservative votes — especially former President Donald J. Trump, who was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the riots on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 last year. With so little agreement about the problem, there is even less about a solution.
Whether Obama’s advocacy can influence the debate remains to be seen. While he hasn’t tried to pass a single solution or piece of legislation, he nevertheless hopes to appeal to common ground across the political spectrum.
“You have to think about how things will be consumed by different partisan filtering, yet make your true, authentic, best case of how you see the world and what the stakes are and why,” said Jason Goldman, a former Twitter, Blogger and Medium executive who served as the White House’s first digital chief officer under Obama and continues to advise him.
“There is some possible reason to believe that a good path exists out of some of the junk we are in,” he added.
As an apostle of the dangers of disinformation, Mr. Obama could be an imperfect messenger. He was the first presidential candidate to take the power of social media in 2008, but then, as president, he did little to intervene as its darker side—propagating falsehoods, extremism, racism and violence—invaded. – and abroad became clear.
“I kind of saw it unfold — and that’s the extent to which information, misinformation, misinformation was weaponized,” Obama said in Chicago, voicing something almost regrettable. He added: “I think I underestimated the extent to which democracies were as vulnerable to it as they were, including our own.”
Obama, his loved ones said, became fixated on misinformation after he left office. He reiterated, as many others have done, whether he had done enough to counter the information campaign ordered by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to tilt the 2016 election against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
