Former President Barack Obama said the way voters consume and share information is weakening democracies around the world and blamed the current information ecosystem empowered by social media companies for “turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses.”
“One of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama said.
Speaking at Stanford University on Thursday, Obama said the current information ecosystem is deepening existing racial and religious divides, though he added that not all the problems of modernity are a byproduct of advancing technology.
“Some of the current challenges we face are inherent to a fully connected world,” Obama said. “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.”
Obama said decisions by social media companies around content moderation and the use of algorithms to rank posts “have made democracies more vulnerable.”
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