Obama wows BC audience

Michelle Obama says social media magnifies feelings of political and cultural division, underlining a need for people to get out of their online silos.

The former first lady of the United States made the remarks Thursday at a sold-out event presented by the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, where she spoke to an audience of mostly women and girls in an auditorium that seats about 2,900 people.

She said for more than a decade, she and former president Barack Obama travelled the United States and found that people mostly got along peacefully.

Obama recalled something her daughter Malia said after a Fourth of July celebration where tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to watch fireworks. After the show, people packed up their things and dispersed calmly, she said.

"It's amazing that this many people can gather this peacefully," Obama recalled her daughter saying.

But Obama said that's what's happening around the world every day. Most people are fundamentally getting along, and they're more alike than they are different, Obama said at the first of two sold-out events she was speaking at on Thursday.

"Social media can do two things: it can bring us together or keep us isolated," she said, noting that people hiding behind a computer screen are emboldened to make nasty remarks.

"A life looking into your phone is not a life," she said. "You have to break out of your silo."

She urged people to connect with one another, not through tweets or posts, but through their voices, and added that the divisiveness of social media also lends itself to a certain type of leader.

"Leaders who lead by fear ... that's all you want to point to, what's broken and wrong," she said. "But if you choose to lead by hope, then you see that good.

"Don't despair. Don't get bogged down in the negativity," she added. "It takes time, but we are moving in the right direction."

Social media does mean that kids are more connected and more knowledgeable than ever before, but it also exposes them to other people's opinions of them, she said.

Just because they got 1,000 likes doesn't mean they have 1,000 friends, she added.