Energy

Obama Blames Fake News For Hindering His Global Warming Plans

(YORGOS KARAHALIS/AFP/Getty Images)

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Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
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President Barack Obama blamed social media-driven fake news for hindering his plans to fight global warming.

Obama told The New Yorker magazine fake news being disseminated on social media “means everything is true and nothing is true.” Obama argued there’s no way to distinguish from what’s true or not on social media.

“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll,” Obama said in the interview.

“And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation,” Obama said.

“Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” Obama added. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it.”

“That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach,” he said. “So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”

Obama’s comments come after news that Facebook is cracking down on what it deems “fake news.” Google has also made moves to take down fake news stories.

“We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” a Facebook spokesperson told CBS News.

“While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news. Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance,” they said.

Not everyone agrees. Facebook critics pointed to a controversy from earlier this year when the company got rid of its trending topics division amid reports employees were suppressing conservative viewpoints.

A contractor hired by Facebook to crack down on fake news said the trending topics division could have kept fake news from entering people’s feeds in the run up to the election.

Pew researchers found 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.

President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory shocked political insiders and the media who expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win based on her lead in most polls.

But voters had something else in mind, and Trump won the electoral vote.

Trump has been highly critical of Obama’s global warming agenda and promised to “cancel” the Paris climate treaty and roll back federal energy regulations.

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