Obama Stresses ‘Need’ For ‘Digital Fingerprints’ To Crack Down On Information That ‘Is Not True’

Former President Barack Obama called for “digital fingerprints” to crack down on information which “is not true,” during a Thursday podcast interview with a former advisor.

“The need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” Obama told David Axelrod, a former Obama advisor who is now a CNN contributor, Fox News reported. “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.”

Social media companies and the FBI came under fire following reports based on documents released to journalists by Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter. Documents released to journalist Michael Shellenberger by Musk show that the FBI contacted Twitter about the potential for leaks involving Hunter Biden prior to the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 report on the contents of a laptop owned by Biden that was abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop.

“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,” Obama said after Axelrod told him during the interview that he had seen “deepfake” materials of Obama. “But just the odds are that I was. As a consequence, there’s a lot of raw material there.”

Obama called for the ramping up of censorship in a 2022 speech at Stanford University, saying that misinformation was causing people to die, and blamed former Trump administration official Steve Bannon and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.