When former President Barack Obama described a metaphorical plan in 2022 to "flood" the public square with "raw sewage," did he present it as either his own or as that of the Democratic Party? No, that's not true: He was describing how propaganda works, not what he or the party was planning to do. He said this in a speech at Stanford University titled "Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy."
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) on Facebook on August 10, 2024. The post's on-screen title said:
It was the plan the whole time wake up people
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Aug 16 15:10:44 2024 UTC)
The video
The clip in the post comes from an hourlong speech (transcript archived here) Obama gave at Stanford on April 21, 2022. Here's what he said in the 40-second video on social media:
You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.
Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game's won.
The speech
Unlike what the social media post with its out-of-context video clip suggests, the former president wasn't laying out a playbook for spreading propaganda; he was talking about the dangers of disinformation.
In its full context, Obama's speech, "Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy," shows that he was explaining how others have spread distrust. He was not endorsing those actions. Here's a longer segment of the address, including the section from the social-media video, which is emphasized in bold below and helps clarify what he was talking about:
Authoritarian regimes and strongmen around the world from China to Hungary, the Philippines. Brazil have learned to conscript social media platforms to turn their own populations against groups they don't like, whether it's ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, journalists, political opponents. And of course, autocrats like Putin have used these platforms as a strategic weapon against democratic countries that they consider a threat.
People like Putin and Steve Bannon, for that matter, understand it's not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.
Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game's won. And as Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election, our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission, such a project.
The former president's entire speech can be watched here:
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At the time this fact check was written, the claim had been reviewed by multiple fact-checking organizations in 2022, including the Associated Press, Reuters, Poynter, Hong Kong Baptist University and Misbar.
