Appearing on on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell to discuss his book on Wednesday, former top Obama aide Ben Rhodes lamented the problem of fake news and its impact on elections. And worried about the lack of government control.

Rhodes was referring back to the election, bring up hacking and leaking of emails, but said that pushing back on hacks and leaks doesn’t address “fake news” or “the fact that people’s social media feeds were being polluted by this Russian content favoring Donald Trump.

“The government didn’t have a lot of capacity to deal with this. I mean we can’t edit people’s Facebook feeds and say ‘that’s fake news, and that’s not'” he said. “And what worries me today, Andrea, is that we still don’t have a lot of capacity, and frankly our government’s probably not doing anything to prevent this.”

This surely brings to mind the worst conservative fears about big, liberal government controlling speech by controlling social media and search, a concern brought up frequently on the right.

Last year, the big companies in the sector testified before congress about the spread of fake news and in particular Russian propaganda.

[featured image via screengrab]

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