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| - By: Prabhanu Das
October 8 2024
In his full speech, Obama explains that authoritarian leaders strategically use disinformation and conspiracies to erode public trust in institutions.
What's the claim?
Several posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook have shared an approximately 40-second clip of a speech by former U.S. President Barack Obama. In the clip, he states, "You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, and plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won."
The captions accompanying these posts quote parts of his speech, with some labeling Obama as a villain and insinuating that he advocates for using conspiracy theories to manipulate people through disinformation. Archive links to these posts can be found here, here, and here.
Posts on Facebook and X carrying the clip from Barack Obama's speech out of context making it seem like the former U.S. president is endorsing disinformation. (Source: Facebook/X/Modified by Logically Facts)
The clips of Obama’s speech, however, have been taken out of context, creating the false impression that he is endorsing disinformation. In reality, Obama was addressing how authoritarian leaders worldwide utilize disinformation as a weapon against democratic nations.
What is the context?
A keyword search revealed that the clip was extracted from Obama's keynote address at Stanford University on April 21, 2022. The address focused on the dangers of disinformation to democracy.
Following this lead, we found the full speech on Youtube (archived here), uploaded by multiple channels (archived here and here). The relevant clip appears between 31:38 and 32:16 in the video.
In this section of the speech, Obama discusses the threats disinformation poses to democracy, explaining how it is generated and consumed. He specifically addresses how authoritarian leaders in countries like China, Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines exploit social media to turn their populations against specific social groups. He further notes that individuals such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and conservative American strategist Steve Bannon understand that it is unnecessary for people to believe disinformation to undermine public institutions; a high volume of disinformation alone can erode trust.
According to the transcript of the address, this is what Obama said in the portion from which the clip was taken:
"Authoritarian regimes and strongmen around the world from China to Hungary, the Philippines. Brazil have learned to conscript social media platforms to turn their own populations against groups they don’t like, whether it’s ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, journalists, political opponents. And of course, autocrats like Putin have used these platforms as a strategic weapon against democratic countries that they consider a threat. People like Putin and Steve Bannon, for that matter, understand it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe. Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won. And as Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election, our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission, such a project."
The full context reveals that Obama did not endorse the use of conspiracy theories to undermine public institutions. Instead, he discussed how authoritarian leaders employ disinformation to target social groups within their countries and to weaken trust in democratic institutions.
The verdict
Obama did not advocate for using disinformation to weaken public institutions in his speech; he was highlighting how authoritarian leaders utilize it in their own countries and against rival democracies.
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