Obama urges social media influencers to help Biden get re-elected

Former President Barack Obama met with a group of social media influencers last weekend, urging them to be nicer to President Joe Biden and help him win his reelection campaign. The group of influencers were expecting a 'special guest' but they did not know it was going to be Obama, according to one person present. 

'So, I heard this is where the cool kids were hanging out, and you know, I always wanted to be one of the cool kids,' Obama said as he entered the room. The former president admitted that it was a 'cynical time' in politics, and that viewers were turned off by the current political discourse in America.

'I need you guys to use your influence, and it doesn't have to be boring. I don't expect you to have a bunch of charts and graphs,' Obama said. Obama met with a group of about 80 different social media influencers on Saturday, according to Axios, and urged them to get involved. 'I get it,' Obama added. 'You know, I frankly watch sports, mostly. Because it feels like everything is slash and burn.'

He urged online digital creators to put aside their differences with Biden, reminding them that politics were often 'messy.' 'Joe Biden, you may not agree with everything he does,' he said. 'By the way, you didn't agree with everything I did. And that's OK. Because in a big, messy, complicated country like this, there are going to be disagreements.'

Obama encouraged online creators to get creative and rely on humor to get more people to support Biden. 'I understand folks are swiping or scrolling, and you've got to use humor and you've got to use other things that are engaging people,' he said.

Top influencers, especially on TikTok, remain angry with Biden for supporting the Israeli war in Gaza. They are also angry with Biden for signing a bill that could ban the popular video sharing app TikTok . The Biden campaign has tried to reach out to more influencers, hosting parties and events for prominent voices online, but they have been welcomed with some malaise and even some hostility from digital creators.

Biden grew angry with one TikTok star recently, even threatening to throw his phone after he approached the president and began questioning him on the war in Gaza. Obama was one of the first presidents to enjoy the benefits of social media when he first ran for president.

At the time, Voters reacted positively to his new approach to politics on relatively new platforms like Twitter and Facebook to celebrate the dawn of a new political era over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Since then, Obama has taken a keen interest in trying to influence the influencers. In 2017, Obama met with young activists and lamented Clinton's loss to Trump, telling influencers that it was partially due to Trump's allies using social media to shift the political narrative in a different direction.

'The question is: Are you able to do that in reverse but to things that are true and are not designed simply to churn anger and resentment and frustration?' he asked. 'So solve that, will you?' he added with a chuckle. In 2022, Obama criticized social media companies for not doing enough to censor information on social media platforms.

'The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn't apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter,' he said. He called for more 'value judgements' on content moderation and censorship on social media lamenting that all content should not be allowed to spread equally. '[O]ver time we lose our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction. Or maybe we just stop caring,' he said.

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