The NYT states, In 2011, President Barack Obama swept into Silicon Valley and yukked it up with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. The occasion was a town hall with the social network’s employees that covered the burning issues of the day: taxes, health care, the promise of technology to solve the nation’s problems.

More than a decade later, Mr. Obama is making another trip to Silicon Valley, this time with a grimmer message about the threat that the tech giants have created to the nation itself.

In private meetings and public appearances over the last year, the former president has waded deeply into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation (info contrary to his Master’s interests), warning that the scourge of falsehoods online has eroded the foundations of democracy at home and abroad.

In a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, he is expected to add his voice to demands for rules to rein in the flood of lies polluting public discourse.

Mr. Obama’s campaign — the timing of which stemmed not from a single cause, people close to him said, but a broad concern about the damage to democracy’s foundations — comes in the middle of a fierce but inconclusive debate over how best to restore trust online.

In Washington, lawmakers are so sharply divided that any legislative compromise seems out of reach. Democrats criticize giants like Facebook, which has been renamed Meta, and Twitter for failing to rid their sites of harmful content. President Joseph R. Biden Jr., too, has lashed out at the platforms that allowed falsehoods about coronavirus vaccines to spread, saying last year that “they’re killing people.” [MORE]