US President Barack Obama, following a US intelligence report describing Russian hacking of last year’s US election campaign, said he is surprised by the extent to which false information has been able to influence the nation’s democratic processes.
The US president, going into his final weeks in the Oval Office, spoke in an interview that aired on Sunday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
“I underestimated the degree to which, in this new information age, it is possible for misinformation, for cyberhacking and so forth, to have an impact on our open societies, our open systems,” Obama said in the interview conducted on Friday last week.
Obama said the ability of foreign countries to impact US political debate partly reflected the cynicism many Americans have toward mainstream news.
“In that kind of environment, where there’s so much skepticism 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,” he said.
The type of interference that US intelligence agencies linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been going on for some time and could happen again during elections in Europe this year, Obama said.
“What is true is that the Russians intended to meddle, and they meddled,” he said. “It could be another country in the future.”
ADVICE TO TRUMP
In a broad-ranging interview, Obama described his recent conversations with US president-elect Donald Trump, whom he termed “very engaging and gregarious.”
The president said he had warned Trump about the dangers posed by unfiltered use of social media after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
“The day that he is the president of the United States, there are world capitals and financial markets and people all around the world who take really seriously what he says, and in a way that’s just not true before you’re actually sworn in as president,” Obama said.
Trump has roiled individual share prices with Twitter messages about the activities of certain companies.
In other recent tweets he has hinted that he would like to change decades of policy on nuclear weapons; indicated he would like closer relations with Russia even after the intelligence report on campaign hacking; and said the UN was a “club for people to get together.”
The US president predicted that the Affordable Care Act, his signature healthcare law, would survive in some form.
“It may be called something else,” he said of “Obamacare.” “I don’t mind.”
On healthcare and other initiatives, “my hope is that the [US] president-elect, members of [US] Congress from both parties look at, ‘Where have we objectively made progress, where are things working better?’ Don’t undo things just because I did them,” he said.
Obama said he takes “some responsibility” for the Democratic Party’s losses during his two terms among House and Senate members and in state legislatures.
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