People need to pay attention to “what’s true and what’s not,” he said.

[Editor’s Note: We have reached truly Orwellian proportions when the president calls out public discussion and “fake news.” What makes this a real howler is that Obama has presided over countless government and media-constructed events at home and abroad alongside the 2012 repeal of the 1948 Smith-Mindt Act banning psychological operations targeting the American public ]

Marina Fang
The Huffington Post

President Barack Obama on Thursday pointed to the profusion of fake news on social media as a sign that people should not take democracy for granted.

In a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama warned that the ease with which people can promulgate fraudulent news stories threatens basic democratic principles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcb8XcV9XIo

“In an age where there’s so much active misinformation ― and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television ― where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same, and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” Obama said.

“We won’t know what to fight for, and we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” he added.

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