(TheRedAlertNews.com) – Former President Barack Obama has demanded the development of “digital fingerprints” of Internet users to prevent the spread of what he calls “misinformation” and “fake news” online.
In an interview with The Axes Files, a podcast run by his former chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, Obama insisted digital fingerprints would help distinguish between genuine and misleading content.
He dwelled in particular on the so-called “deepfakes” – digitally manipulated video, audio, or photos that appear real.
“That technology’s here now,” the former Democrat president stressed to his former White House senior adviser, as cited by Newsmax.
“We’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before. This next election cycle will be worse,” he predicted regarding the 2024 election.
Obama argued that because of that, the American public would have “to be more discriminating consumers of news and information.”
He declared further that these developments necessitated the invention of technologies for digital “watermarks” or “fingerprints” – just so that “we know what is true and what is not true.”
At the same time, the former president dwelled on how those would take a lot of work and time, which was why “it’s really going to be up to the American people” to identify deepfakes on their own ahead and during the 2024 election.
Obama also argued he was “the first digital president,” and, as a result, when he left office in 2017, he had “probably” become the “most recorded, filmed, photographed human in history.” He described that proposition as a “kind of a weird thing.”
However, he argued that despite the advances in deepfake technology, there was good news – namely, that most people had already realized that “not everything that pops up on your phone is true.”
According to the former president, misinformation could be applied in other ways in those cases.
Those include presenting the political system as corrupt and rigged, thus repulsing people from voting – which would play to the advantage of the powerful.”
“I am worried about that kind of cynicism developing even further during the course of this next election,” Obama concluded.
What is your opinion about what Obama is demanding? Please share your thoughts and views about Obama by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
Obama: Need "digital fingerprints" to fight misinformation https://t.co/d5Lof2HEQC pic.twitter.com/uial06Vxie
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) June 19, 2023
