Obama calls on government to regulate speech

Former President Barack Obama said at a forum Tuesday that the U.S. must address what he called misinformation and said government must regulate social media platforms to ensure facts are separated from opinions.

During an appearance on The Connecticut Forum’s “An Evening with President Barack Obama,” the former president said he worries about the current state of discourse and spoke of a growing disregard for facts. He said that this undermines trust in society.

“I’ve said this before, but I always repeat it. You and I can have an opinion about this little side table. You know, you might not like the design. You might not like the color or how it’s finished, but we can have that discussion. If I say to you this is a lawnmower, you’ll think I’m crazy,” Obama said. “And if I really believe it, I’ll think you’re crazy. And we’re now in a situation in which we are having these basic factual arguments. And that further undermines trust.”

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Obama then spoke of Vladimir Putin.

“Vladimir Putin and the KGB had a saying that was then adopted proudly by Steve Bannon, which was if you want propaganda to be effective [then] you don’t have to convince people that what you are saying is true. You just have to flood the zone with so much poop. They use a different word. But you have to flood the zone with so much untruth, constantly, that at some point people don’t believe anything,” Obama added.

“So it doesn’t matter if a candidate running for office just is constantly, just hypothetically, saying untrue things, or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost and that the system was rigged, but then when he wins, then it isn’t rigged, because he won. It doesn’t matter if everybody believes it. It just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.’”

Obama said this is dangerous and called upon journalists and social media to take new approaches.

“So one of the things I think, Heather, you’re doing, for those of you who don’t know her newsletter, it’s an example of, give you a little plug here. But part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion,” Obama said. “We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things?”

“That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence,” Obama said.

“And that, I think, is going to be a big challenge for all of us that we’re going to have to undertake.”

Obama’s argument that misinformation is the primary driver of eroding public trust in institutions is contradicted by a 2024 Knight Foundation study, “From Trust to Disagreement: Disentangling the Interplay of Misinformation and Polarization in the News Ecosystem.” The study challenges this claim by indicating that misinformation may receive lower trust ratings compared to accurate information. The growing societal distrust may not stem from the spread of misinformation itself but rather from deeper political polarization and ideological divides.

A March 2025 study called “Trust in Disinformation Narratives: A Trust in the News Experiment” said that factors like political ideology, topic, and toxic expressions in news articles played a more significant role in influencing trust than the accuracy of the information itself. The study also said that the authorship of the articles had little impact on trust.

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