Tweeting ourselves to death: Obama’s social media warning

Barack Obama has given very few interviews since he left office almost a year ago, but if the one aired by BBC Radio 4 yesterday was any guide, we haven’t been missing much of pith and moment.

Barack Obama has given very few interviews since he left office almost a year ago, but if the one aired by BBC Radio 4 yesterday was any guide, we haven’t been missing much of pith and moment.

It probably wasn’t a fair guide, because the interviewer was Britain’s Prince Harry who, after this outing, would be well advised to stick to his career — and we use the word in its widest possible sense — as a celebrity fundraiser for good causes.

The conversation, however, did give Mr Obama the opportunity to talk about the anti-social effects of social media on public discourse and democracy, and to warn of what can happen when it’s used thoughtlessly.

This was a typically polite criticism of not only his successor in the White House but also of the billions of users who do not think before they tweet or post poisonous messages on Facebook.

A crucial question — which Harry failed to ask — concerns the responsibilities of the companies that claim to be mere platforms but are in fact publishers who, unlike those who produce newspapers, magazines and books, recognise no legal or moral accountability for what appears on their pages.

Yes, they might get around sooner or later to removing violent or obscene postings when they are alerted to them, but they have yet to come up with a system that prevents publication in the first place.

2018 must be the year in which they are made to deal with it.