Obama Is Wrong about the Fairness Doctrine

Last week, President Barack Obama expressed his worries about “democratic backsliding” in a speech at Stanford University, blaming social-media platforms for spreading disinformation at an unprecedented pace using algorithms that through “subtle manipulations” promote conspiracism, racism, and sexism.

Obama raised these concerns only a few days before Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter under the banner of defending free online speech, leading to expectations that Twitter would further relax its content-moderation policies. But while both Musk and Obama have described themselves as “free speech absolutists,” Obama means something very different by the phrase than Musk does.