Obama: Social Media Platforms Are ‘Well Designed’ to Destroy Democracies

EXCERPT:

OBAMA: "Understand, it’s not necessary for people to believe disinformation in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage, use that to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing, that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game is won. And as Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election, our own social media platforms are well-designed to support such a mission, such a project. Russians could study and manipulate patterns in the engagement ranking system on Facebook or YouTube. And as a result, Russian state-sponsored trolls could almost guarantee that whatever disinformation they put out there would reach millions of Americans, and that the more inflammatory the story, the quicker it spread.”