Chronic. The charge is severe, but the man speaks from experience. In several of the interviews that Barack Obama gave these days to promote the first volume of his Memoirs, published Tuesday, November 17 (A promised land, Fayard), the former president chose a common thread: that of the threat that disinformation poses to democracy. “If we don’t have the ability to tell right from wrong, then by definition the free market for ideas doesn’t work., he explains to The Atlantic. And by definition, our democracy does not work. We are living in an epistemological crisis. “
Barack Obama knows what he is talking about, he who had to have the full copy of his birth certificate exhumed from the Hawaii civil records to counter the false information spread by Donald Trump, according to which he was not born in the USA. The extract was not enough. “Fake news”, therefore! Certainly, but there is always something left: peddled and amplified by social networks, the accusation had even turned into a movement, the “Birtherism”, a sort of variant of nativism.
Obama and the turbocharger
“Distinguish the true from the false” ? How to say… When Obama’s successor in the White House continues to tweet to the whole world “I WON THE ELECTION! “ while the whole earth knows he lost it. Except, perhaps, the 600,000 or so people who approved that tweet. It is little, finally, in view of its 73 million voters. But Donald Trump will go down in posterity as the president under whose reign the United States got hold of the truth.
Barack Obama can measure the damage. While anger is mounting in his country against the Internet giants who gave birth to social networks and massively developed them out of control, he himself refuses to hold them responsible. The problem is earlier, he says, while acknowledging that “Social networks have played a role of turbocharger”. Here again, Obama speaks from experience: he used this turbocharger to perfection during his election campaigns.
The darling of the Web in politics, at the beginning, it is him. In 2008, a young senator from Illinois, he was the first presidential candidate to rely on the new media whose multiplying power he seized. For his re-election in 2012, he added that of social networks which, in the meantime, have taken off. President Obama then has 34 million friends on Facebook. His digital team asks them to share his messages: they campaign for him. It crosses the electoral lists with the personal data collected on Facebook or Tumbler, targets the undecided.
You have 53.96% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
