Obama tells Glasgow crowd extremism drift is 'not inevitable'

Former president also warns AI could erode democratic functioning

Former US President Barack Obama told a crowd of 12,150 at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on Wednesday that the drift toward extremism is “not inevitable,” while warning that online platforms and artificial intelligence are reshaping the information environment in ways that risk democratic functioning. He spoke in conversation with British journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera on the second of three planned UK speaking dates; Obama has already addressed an audience in Belfast and is scheduled to appear in Manchester on Thursday.

The 65-year-old, the 44th president of the United States, told the Glasgow audience that during his 2008 presidential campaign, when social media and technology was gaining traction, he had viewed the emerging platforms as “a beacon for hope.” He said the same positive forces and tools that could mobilise people around democracy or human rights could also be used by hate groups.

“It turns out that the reptilian side of our brain really gets attracted to anger, fear, resentment and the sense that someone is out to get you,” Obama said. “So a lot of social media and a lot of our information is informed around that.”

The former president placed much of the current political polarization on the information flowing into the public. “If I had a blame pie for why politics is so polarised and why we’re seeing a rise of populism in many places, it’s because of that information that is going into our brains every day,” he said.

Obama invoked the post-World War Two settlement as a model for holding information platforms accountable. After the war, he noted, the US federal government and European governments had established rules to constrain propaganda, having seen “how big lies and misinformation can distort and enrage and incite violence.” “We have not chosen to do that,” he said of the present moment.

Obama acknowledged the difficulty of drawing the line between regulation and free speech, saying there is a “critical balance” to strike. He said leaders will need to develop “mechanisms and new institutions to allow rigorous debate and disagreement while helping people sort out basic facts.”

Obama also raised concerns about artificial intelligence, saying he feared AI would make it harder to distinguish between truth and falsehood — a development he said could make democracy hard to function. He said the present information environment leaves young people feeling discouraged and described it as “not a healthy diet that our brains are on at the moment.”

Asked whether he still believed in a Martin Luther King Jr phrase he had cited in years past — that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice — Obama said he did. He described hope as an active, “almost theological” choice: “a decision about how do we face and embrace this finite amount of time we have on the planet.” “I think when we act on that basis, it doesn’t always work out, but over time things do get better,” he said.

Obama also warned of a recurring historical pattern in which people forget lessons of the past and begin to treat language that scapegoats minorities — “immigrants, Jews, or blacks or gays” — as mere “talk” or “humour.” He said the world faces “big challenges” but that making it better remains worth fighting for.