Barack Obama Pushes ‘Digital Fingerprints’ to Fight ‘Misinformation’

The former Democrat president wants the origin of digital information such as photos and videos to be clearly traced, to fight the spread of deepfakes.

“That technology’s here now,” said Obama in a discussion with his former advisor David Axelrod on the latter’s CNN podcast. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

“”And 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.”

The idea of fighting “misinformation” by tracing the origin of digital info is not new. A coalition of tech and media companies led by Microsoft is already trying to make this technology the industry standard, as is a coalition with similar goals led by Adobe.

Before he left office, President Obama helped spark the media panic over “fake news” — later rebranded as “misinformation” — that was adopted by the media, NGOs, and tech companies as a pretext to suppress conservative content.