This is a lie.
Obama was warning about disinformation, not endorsing it
Former President Barack Obama wasn’t praising disinformation in a TikTok video.
A speech about the dangers of disinformation that former President Barack Obama gave at Stanford University on April 21, 2022, is being used months later on social media to spread disinformation.
“Is he on offense or defense?” read text overlaying a shortened TikTok
video created April 30. “Notice he says ‘the game’s won,’ not the game is over.”
In the tightly cropped, black-and-white video, Obama said:
“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 is won.”
That four-month-old TikTok video was
shared more than 3,800 times just on that platform, and has more recently been
shared on Twitter.
One user who shared the video has more than 63,000 followers. That tweet was liked more than 13,000 times.
Other similar TikTok videos also
show Obama
saying the same line.
Obama’s quote is real, but the videos are edited to leave out context and create the false impression that he supports the intentional spread of disinformation, which is false information created or shared intentionally to mislead others.
In the full speech, Obama — who was giving the keynote address at an event hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center about disinformation’s threat to democracy — called for governments and tech companies to better protect users.
Former President Barack Obama wasn’t praising disinformation in a TikTok video.
www.poynter.org