Obama raises alarm over social media

Former U.S. president Barack Obama said the way people communicate via social media may break the society.

Obama spoke in an interview with Britain’s Prince Harry, broadcast on BBC radio on Wednesday.

He appealed that social media should promote diverse views in a way that “doesn’t lead to a Balkanisation of our society.”

“All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the Internet.

“One of the dangers of the Internet is that people can have entirely different realities, they can be just cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

Obama previously warned that social media platforms can lead people to make snap judgements about complex decisions although he has refrained from criticising his successor Donald Trump who regularly uses Twitter.

Obama added that moving online communities offline helped people to see that many issues were not as simple as they might seem in a chatroom.

“It’s also by the way harder to be as obnoxious and cruel in person as people can be anonymously on the Internet,” he said.