In Nigeria, if you disagree with someone on Twitter or Facebook, you can get blocked which means that social media that was expected to bring people of diverse opinions together is serving as tool that is being used to listen to only the people who agree with us. We’re not the only one with this problem and Obama is talking about it.
President Barack Obama seems to be focusing on pushing the agenda for digital citizenship post-presidency as affirmed by a statement issued by the Obama Foundation.
According to the foundation, the original promise of the Internet was one of openness, inclusion, and a great leveling of opportunity to be heard — and with all that, a healthy, genuine competition between different points of view.
“Going online was supposed to help us learn across differences, to face challenging new information, and to connect with people from wildly diverse geographic, cultural, and ideological backgrounds — in a way pre-digital life never could. Instead, we now have a situation in which everybody’s listening to people who already agree with them.”
According to Obama, nearly everyone with a connected device knows how easy it is to reinforc[e] their own realities, to the neglect of a common reality that allows us to have a healthy debate and then try to find common ground and actually move solutions forward.
