Former President Barack Hussein Obama has called for “digital fingerprints” to be mandatory to help law enforcement agencies target and arrest users who read and share “non-mainstream news” online.
In a new interview, Obama said the development of new tracking technology could help identify users who spread “fake news” online.
Tracking those users and punishing them would help bolster mainstream news outlets on the internet, Obama argues.
Slaynews.com reports: Obama sat down with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod for a conversation on the latter’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” on CNN Audio.
During the interview, Axelrod noted he’s seen “misinformation, disinformation, [and] deepfakes” targeting Obama.
“As I’ve told people, because I was the first digital president when I left office, I was probably the most recorded filmed photographed human in history, which is kind of a weird thing,” responded Obama.
Obama added that the deepfakes — digitally manipulated images, audio, or video that appear almost legitimate — started with a version of him dancing, “saying dirty limericks,” or similar kinds of activity.
“So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”
Obama then suggested “digital fingerprints” to discern truth from misinformation.
“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to overtime develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” he said.
“There’s a whole bunch of work that’s going to have to be done there, but in the short term, it’s really going to be up to the American people to kind of say.”
Obama and Axelrod went on to say that today many consumers are only viewing information from sources they are predisposed to agree with and will likely believe what they see.
“Obviously, we saw that during the vaccination stuff,” added Obama, referring to Covid shots.
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