Obama’s partisan ‘disinformation’ campaign

Obama's partisan 'disinformation' campaign

Byron York - 

Washington Examiner

| April 22, 2022 01:23 PM

OBAMA'S PARTISAN 'DISINFORMATION' CAMPAIGN. A big fad in Democratic circles is to hold events devoted to discussing the threat of "disinformation" in America. Former top Obama adviser David Axelrod, who now runs the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, recently held a conference on "disinformation and the erosion of democracy." His old boss, former President Barack Obama, stopped by. But now Obama has taken center stage for himself on the disinformation issue with a speech Thursday at Stanford University, in the heart of the nation's tech industry.

Obama's speech is important, in part because it will likely be influential among powerful tech executives. It might be seen as giving new energy to an effort to regulate social media. But the speech is also important for what it did not say. Obama, like others in the Democratic Party and in establishment media circles, is targeting some types of disinformation while remaining strikingly silent about others. There is disinformation that he finds deeply threatening, and there is disinformation he doesn't seem to notice at all.

The address began with the commonly expressed talking point that developments in the United States are part of a larger, global trend toward authoritarianism. Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine "isn't happening in a vacuum," Obama said. "Autocrats and aspiring strongmen have become emboldened around the globe. They're actively subverting democracy. They're undermining hard-won human rights. They're ignoring international law."

"Right here in the United States of America," Obama continued, "we just saw a sitting president deny the clear results of an election and help incite a violent insurrection at the nation's Capitol. Not only that, but a majority of his party, including many who occupy some of the highest offices in the land, continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the last election and are using it to justify laws that restrict the vote and make it easier to overturn the will of the people in states where they hold power."

These developments inside the Republican Party are a warning, Obama said. "For those of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law, this should serve as a wake-up call." It is an important topic to bring up in Silicon Valley, he continued, because the rise of social media is contributing to "one of the biggest reasons for democracy's weakening: the profound change that has taken place in how we communicate and consume information."

Obama, who last year turned 60, based his speech on a nostalgic vision of a rosy, or at least rosier, past. In that past, people had fewer sources of information and thus fewer conflicts. "If you were watching TV between about 1960 and 1990," he said, mentioning the once-popular sitcoms I Dream of Jeannie and The Jeffersons, "chances are you were watching one of the Big Three networks." Obama said that sort of television had its own failings, including the exclusion of women and people of color, "but it did fortify a sense of shared culture." That was particularly true in the area of journalism. "When it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts — what they saw, what they heard from Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley or others," Obama said.

It was a classic liberal boomer lament, a desire for a past before the arrival of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio and the internet and Fox News — developments that gave conservatives a greater voice in the political world. And of course, it is entirely ahistorical. It doesn't take a professor to list the terrible conflicts that occurred in history long before the arrival of social media.

Nevertheless, Obama looked back to a day when people were happy not knowing what they didn't know. "Forty years ago, if you were a conservative in rural Texas," he said, "you weren't necessarily offended by what was going on in San Francisco's Castro District because you didn't know what was going on."

Obama even felt nostalgic about the beginnings of social media because it gave his political prospects a big boost. "In the early days of the internet and social media, there was a certain joy in finding new ways to connect and organize and stay informed," he said. "There was so much promise — I know, I was there."

"I might never have been elected president if it hadn't been for websites like — and I'm dating myself — Myspace, Meetup, and Facebook that allowed an army of young volunteers to organize, raise money, spread our message," Obama added. "That's what elected me."

But now it all has changed. Now, in Obama's telling, the internet is a forum for some Republicans to spread disinformation about the 2020 election. That is not to say disinformation about the 2020 election is not bad. It is bad. But there is more to the story. In recent years, our politics has been plagued by an equally potent form of disinformation coming from the Democratic side — something the Democratic former president left out of his Stanford speech.

An example. In the first days of January 2017, the so-called Steele dossier was circulating among senior members of Obama's administration. It falsely alleged a "well-developed conspiracy" between President-elect Donald Trump and Russia. It falsely alleged that a Putin associate in Russia offered a low-level Trump campaign aide a huge bribe to end U.S. sanctions against Russia. It falsely alleged that Trump fixer Michael Cohen met with Russians in Prague to plot collusion. And it falsely alleged that Russian intelligence had a so-called "pee tape," a video of private citizen Trump watching prostitutes perform a "golden showers" sex act in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.

Obama's top aides thought the Steele dossier was so important that it should be brought to the president's attention. Here is an excerpt from Russian Roulette, in which journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn described an Oval Office meeting in January 2017:

[National security adviser Susan] Rice had encouraged [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper during the daily intelligence briefing to tell Obama about the "golden showers" allegation. Obama turned to Rice and said, "Why am I hearing this?" He was incredulous. "What's happening?" he asked. Rice said the intelligence community had no idea if this story was true but that Obama needed to be aware the allegation was circulating. "You don't really expect to hear the term 'golden showers' in the President's Daily Brief," a participant in this meeting later said, "or that the guy who is going to become president may be a Manchurian candidate."

Just days later, through a series of leaks, the dossier became public. The disinformation became a major part of public conversation about Trump for years to come.

In the Stanford speech, Obama did not mention the dossier — disinformation that had literally made its way to his desk as president. Nor did he mention other forms of disinformation that have gone viral in the social media world: the Jussie Smollett hoax, for example, or the gang-rape allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Nor did Obama mention social media's role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop revelations or in the spread of the false accusation that the laptop's contents were "Russian disinformation."

Sticking to his one-sided approach, Obama prescribed some possible fixes for the state of social media — "to preserve the transformative power and promise of the open internet while at least mitigating the worst of its harms." He cautioned that his suggestions will not cure all that ails American democracy, nor will they get rid of all offensive material on the web. They will not be perfect, he said, because they involve value judgments made by imperfect human beings.

"Here is what I think our guiding principles should be," Obama began. "The way I'm going to evaluate any proposal touching on social media and the internet is whether it strengthens or weakens the prospects for a healthy, inclusive democracy, whether it encourages robust debate and respect for our differences, whether it reinforces rule of law and self-governance, whether it helps us make collective decisions based on the best available information, and whether it recognizes the rights and freedoms and dignity of all of our citizens. Whatever changes contribute to that vision, I'm for. Whatever erodes that vision, I'm against. Just so you know."

It was a remarkably boilerplate set of guidelines that could be used to justify almost anything. Obama then laid out a proposal for more government regulation of the web and a greater sense of common-good responsibility among tech leaders. It was all just as fuzzy and nice-sounding as his list of principles. But he argues it can lessen the threat of disinformation in our society.

In what way? Nearing the end of his speech, Obama gave an extraordinarily telling example of how his plan might work. "It is possible to broaden our perspectives," he said. To illustrate that, he cited a recent study by researchers who paid a group of regular Fox News watchers to watch CNN instead for a month. "These were not swing voters," Obama said. "These were hardcore Hannity-Carlson fans. And what the researchers found was that at the end of the month, people's views on certain issues, like whether voting by mail should be allowed or whether electing Joe Biden would lead to more violence against police — on some of these issues, their views had changed by 5, 8, 10 points. These people didn't suddenly turn into liberals — I'm sure they still don't like me — but at the margins, they had reshaped their perspectives in meaningful ways."

There it is. Perhaps social media companies could do something similar. Perhaps they could play the role of the good guys, CNN, in changing the views of people who watch the bad guys, Fox News. Or, to be more open about it, perhaps they could play the role of Democrats in changing the views of Republicans. And for those who believe that is precisely what social media companies are already trying to do — well, perhaps they could do even more. That is Obama's vision. "Now is the time to pick a side," he said. "We have a choice right now: Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we make it better? That is the choice we face."