Obama surprised by how effectively false information swayed voters
Washington — President Barack Obama says he has been surprised by the extent to which false information has been able to influence the nation’s democratic processes. The president, talking to ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos as he enters his final weeks in the Oval Office, was commenting on an intelligence report describing Russian hacking of the 2016 US election campaign, "I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyber hacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems," Obama said. The interview was conducted on Friday. Obama said the ability of foreign countries to affect the US political debate partly reflected the cynicism many people had toward mainstream news. "In that kind of environment, where there’s so much scepticism about information that’s coming in, we’re going to have to spend a lot more time thinking about how do we protect our democratic process," Obama added. Th...
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