President Obama is currently visiting China and held a town hall meeting with students in Shanghai where he took the following question:
“Should we be able to use Twitter freely?”
Obama's answer was diplomatic, candid and sets an excellent tone for discussion of this issue. The meeting was live broadcast in China and through the White House website with simultaneous translation. The questions and Obama's responses remained up and accessible hours after the event:
“I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time,” he said. But, he added, “because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”
Read the entire NYT article here
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