Obama: I Underestimated the Threat of Disinformation
When they last sat down for an interview, in November 2020, Barack Obama told Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg that disinformation is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.” The threat was not a new one, he said, but it was accelerating. It has continued to accelerate since. A month and a half after that conversation, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, driven by the false belief that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump and could be taken back by force. Over the past year, COVID conspiracism has likely cost thousands of lives. Russia has mounted a massive disinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Ukraine. Yesterday, at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Obama and Goldberg spoke once again about the threat of disinformation and what we can do to stop it. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision. It can be heard on an episode of the podcast Radio Atlantic here:
Jeffrey Goldberg: Talk a little bit about Ukraine, where we are right now. Something that I think everybody here would appreciate is the chance to hear you talk about this through the prism of your knowledge of Vladimir Putin. You spent a lot of time with him, a lot of time grappling with him. Spend a couple of minutes, if you can, explaining where we are and where you think this is headed.
Barack Obama: Well, it is a tragedy of historic proportions. That’s not news to people here. You can see it. It is calling the question about a set of trends around the world that we’ve seen building for some time. Putin represented a very particular reaction to the ideals of democracy, but also globalization, the collision of cultures, the ability to harness anger and resentment around an ethno-nationalist mythology. And what we’re seeing is the consequences of that kind of toxic mix in the hands of an autocratic government that doesn’t have a lot of checks and balances. I think it is also fair to say that it is a bracing reminder for democracies that had gotten flabby and confused and feckless around the stakes of things that we tended to take for granted.
Goldberg: Do you include our democracy in that?
Obama: Yes. Rule of law. Freedom of press and conscience of the sort that one of your previous speakers, Maria Ressa, represents—you have to fight for that information, or you have to fight to provide people the information they need to be free and self-governing; it doesn’t just happen inevitably. Independent judiciaries making elections work in ways that are fair and free. We have gotten complacent, and I cannot guarantee that, as a consequence of what’s happened, we are shaking off that complacency.
As somebody who grappled with the incursion into Crimea and the eastern portions of Ukraine, I have been encouraged by the European reaction because in 2014, I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways that we would have wanted to see from those of us who describe ourselves as Western democracies. In terms of Putin and where he takes this, there’s been a lot of literature about this, a lot of reporting about this. I don’t know that the person I knew is the same as the person who is now leading this charge. He was always ruthless. You witnessed what he did in Chechnya. He had no qualms about crushing those who he considered a threat. That’s not new. For him
