Obama calls for technology regulation to combat disinformation on social media

US President Barack Obama said Thursday that the spread of misinformation online is detrimental to US democracy, and the technology industry needs regulations and laws to address the problem.

“The design of this platform seems to be going in the wrong direction,” Obama said at an event at the Stanford Center for Cyber politics.

The comments come as Congress considers various reforms to counter the tech industry’s power. Including competition, privacy laws, and changes to the protection law known as Section 230, which allows content moderation and protects platforms from consumer accountability. Release.

This debate has been raging in Washington for several years. Obama’s stance is remarkable because many reformers now consider his government pro-technology. According to a review of meeting minutes released by the Technology Transparency Project. Google reportedly maintains a close relationship with the Obama White House, including meeting officials hundreds of times.

“Perhaps I would never have been elected president if it weren’t for sites like. And I met myself MySpace, Meetup, and Facebook, which allow an army of young volunteers to raise money and spread our message,” Obama said. “It chose me.”

But relations between Washington and Silicon Valley were less strained at the time.

Things change dramatically in 2016 after Donald Trump was electe President, also the scandal was expose with Cambridge Analytica on Facebook.

Obama said he was “not convinced that eradicating Section 230 is the answer. President Joe Biden, who is Obama’s vice president, advocate a similar policy during the White House campaign. Although most Democrats took a less extreme position. Obama carried it in moderation. He said Congress should consider legislative reform and that platforms “should have a higher standard of care when advertising on their sites.”

“If regulation is structure properly, it can increase competition and prevent new innovators from freezing,” Obama said.

Many conservative lawmakers have accused social media companies of ideological censorsh. Although the platform denies this, saying they only impose guidelines on their communities. However, Obama pointed out that the free speech argument has severe limitations.

“I’m almost a First Amendment absolutist,” Obama said. “The first change is an examination of state power. This does not apply to private companies such as Facebook or Twitter or to editorial decisions by the NYT or Fox News. Never. Social media companies have already decided what is and isn’t allow on their platforms and how that content appears. Either explicitly through content moderation or implicitly through algorithms. The problem is that we often do not know what principle underlies these decisions.”