Cindy asked Barack Obama:

You talk about how technology and the internet helped secure your presidency, but that you could not anticipate “how one day many of the same tools that had put me in the White House would be deployed in opposition to everything I stood for.” With how often misinformation spreads on social media, do you believe, if you had run for president today, our tumultuous state of the internet would have helped or hindered you?

Barack Obama It’s hard to say for sure. And a lot of that has to do with changes in how we get our information. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t deal with misinformation in 2008. Facebook and Twitter were around, but they were in their relative infancy. Even then, there was a good chunk of the country that came to believe I wasn’t born in America, or that I was schooled in a radical madrassa, or whatever. And some of that is as old as our country. People have been claiming all sorts of weird things about politicians for centuries. You’ve got to have a thick skin to run for office.

But there’s no doubt that the country is deeply divided right now, and when you look back even to 2008, it didn’t feel this divided. We’ve been sorted further into our own political, ideological, and cultural camps. I’ve been talking about this for a long time. I remember delivering a long commencement address about it back in 2010 at the University of Michigan. If you watch Fox News, and now some of the outlets even farther to the right, versus if you read The New York Times, you increasingly don’t just perceive a different reality, but inhabit one. There was a time when we overlapped in where we got our information. A time when a lot of it came from reading local newspapers. The gap wasn’t so stark as it is now. And because of those echo chambers and because of social media, you’ve got a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump, for example, who are convinced that climate change isn’t real, who are convinced that the pandemic wasn’t mishandled, who are convinced that he actually won the election. And those right-wing outlets feed those convictions. Let’s be honest about this, there’s only one side that has rejected a respect for facts, logic, science, and the rule of law. And until we repair that breach and return to some common baseline of facts from which to discuss the direction of the country, it’s going to be a real challenge to not only bring the country together, but actually address the problems that are real, whether you believe in them or not.

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