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Former president Barack Obama is speaking out about the current president’s favorite form of communication. While speaking on Wednesday night in San Francisco, Obama addressed the data-analysis company Splunk and was talking about diversity, according to While speaking on Wednesday night in San Francisco, Obama addressed the data-analysis company Splunk.
While diversity was a strong topic, he also mentioned social media and the dangers that come with reading comments online.
“What you have to do is to create a process where you have confidence that whatever data is out there has been sifted, sorted and the core issues that are going to be important to your decision, you’re able to see it around,” Obama said. “And that requires not just a good process but making sure you have a team that’s got a diversity of opinion. The other thing that’s helpful is not watching TV. Or, you know, reading, you know, social media,” he said to a cheering crowd.
“So those are two things I would advise if you’re president not to do, because it creates a lot of noise and clouds your judgment.”
He later added:
“You can make sure that people who are providing you that information get a clear signal from you that you want facts, and you want bad news first. And you don’t want spinning and you don’t want sugarcoating and you want a diversity of opinion, and you send that signal strong at the outset.”
“If you are susceptible to worrying about what are the polls saying, or what might this person say about this topic or you start mistaking the intensity of the passion of a very small subset of people with a broader sense of how the country or people who actually know something about the topic you’re dealing with think, that will sway your decision-making in an unhealthy way.”
Obama’s main point was that it is important to keep the noise out. Of course, we shouldn’t expect the current president to take anything that Obama has to say to heart. But hey, at least he tried.
