When it comes to disinformation, ex-prez Barack Obama is an expert. Just not in the way he seems to think.
In a Stanford University speech Thursday, Obama called on Big Tech to “redesign” itself to face the dangers disinformation allegedly poses to the nation.
Hilariously, he cited his own “failure to fully appreciate . . . just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories” during his time in office.
Hah! That susceptibility was key to his success.
Obama, after all, won PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” Award in 2013 for his endlessly repeated claim that under ObamaCare, “if you like your health plan, you can keep it.”
This lie was treated as fact and amplified by major media across the US for naked political purposes. I.e., a textbook example of actual disinformation. In fact, his “reforms” guaranteed that millions of Americans would lose their old coverage, and he darn well knew it.
When they did, The New York Times invented a new, Orwellian term as camouflage for the lie: “incorrect promise.”
Then there was Benghazi, where his administration blamed an attack by an al Qaeda affiliate against a US consular outpost on an inflammatory YouTube video — and again saw the lie propped up by big media properties.
More classic, actual disinfo.
Don’t forget his lie about whether he ever set a red line around Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. He did. On record. Then, insanely, he literally claimed he hadn’t.
Again, although he’d been caught in an obvious, clumsy lie, our fearless fact-checking journalists got busy trying to somehow make it reality. Washington Post “Minister of Truth” Glenn Kessler refused to award it any of his trademark “Pinocchios.”
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Obama presided over the start of the Russiagate narrative, now revealed as another textbook disinfo operation — one of the most successful in recent US history, not only kneecapping the Trump administration but leaving tens of millions of Americans still convinced of the lie even today.
The ex-president is utterly comfortable with the media spreading disinformation, as long as it benefits his team. His demand for a “redesign” is plainly just a push for tighter controls to make the playing field even less level.
Unless and until Obama demands fixes to prevent outrages like the suppression of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting, he’s simply another rich, powerful guy using his sway to stifle the free exchange of ideas.
And unlike the “disinformation” bogeyman, that is an actual threat to democracy.
