Barack Obama Proposes a Scary Idea for Social Media

It’s hard not to see where this road leads.

Screenshot of Barack Obama via English Speeches YouTube channel.

44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, is increasingly inserting himself as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party as it looks to pick up new seats in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

In a recent conversation with journalist Heather Cox Richardson, whose Substack he personally endorsed, Obama said the quiet part out loud: “We’re going to have to start experimenting with new forms of journalism” with “government regulatory constraints.”

“Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts and separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government regulatory constraints…” Obama said.

He added that this should be done in a way “that’s consistent” with the First Amendment, while paradoxically arguing that platforms should crack down on speech “in the sense of inciting violence,” something already not protected under the First Amendment.

“There is a difference between letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence, voices,” he continued. “That I think is going to be a big challenge for all of us to undertake.”

Cyber expert and former Trump official Mike Benz reacted to Obama’s remarks, saying: “F*ck this guy. His whole apparatus is set up to end the First Amendment. He’s coordinating with foreign governments to end free speech in America. And he spied and lied and did every dirty trick in the book along the way.”

This call to suppress the “most hateful” and “most polarizing” voices is especially chilling because those terms are so vague that they can easily be weaponized to silence critics of government policy.

In the UK, police make over 30 arrests a day for “offensive” online messages under broad communications laws, which goes to show just how fast speech rules can get out of control.

A large part of this criminalizing of so-called “offensive messages” targets criticism of unchecked immigration policies—policies that have led to the rape of countless British girls and are now being used to justify digital IDs, with compliance required to keep the “right to work.”

It’s a dystopian playbook: create or exacerbate a problem, silence the critics of the problem, and then push in a new control mechanism (digital IDs) to tighten the grip on society.

Obama’s words may sound nice, even reasonable to unsuspecting populations: “Yeah, we should crack down on hateful and dangerous speech,” some might say.

But what he’s proposing is the dream of every modern tyrant: regulation of facts, deciding who gets amplified and who gets silenced, and dictating what kind of speech is considered “appropriate” online.

Some of you may not be happy with Trump, but after what Democrats did during COVID with the censorship-industrial complex, it’s hard not to see where this road leads. If Democrats regain full control, the First Amendment may not survive.