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Obama’s plans to fight disinformation are better than most | The Verge

By Casey Newton on April 21, 2022

A former president of the United States has their pick of big problems to tackle once they leave office. Jimmy Carter worked on housing. Bill Clinton spent much of his time working to fight HIV and AIDS. Barack Obama, who has been out of office for six years, has so far led a fairly quiet post-presidency. But in recent weeks, he has begun drawing attention to an issue that advisers say has become increasingly important to him: disinformation, and the broader problems with our fractured information ecosystem.

In the months after President Donald Trump was dislodged from office, what could feel at times like an all-consuming focus on disinformation in the tech and political press began to fade into the background. The shift is understandable: Trump had been the most prominent spreader of disinformation in the world, and once he lost access to the Oval Office and his Twitter account, dozens of false claims that the media would otherwise have spent all day running down simply disappeared from the headlines.

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Source: Obama’s plans to fight disinformation are better than most | The Verge

2020 US Election, Disinformation, Extreme Right, Influence, State Actors

Obama’s plans to fight disinformation are better than most | The Verge

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