The United Nations (UN) appears to be firmly embracing its novel role as one of “disinformation warriors” through what can be described as a series of “nesting dolls” of censorship and surveillance-enabling treaties, resolutions, frameworks, and initiatives.
The world organization, once focused on peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts, is now using its Department of Global Communications as a bullhorn to promote these new priorities.
The head of the department and UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is particularly active, if repetitive in her efforts. During a gathering in Mexico earlier in the week, Fleming once again delivered some doomsday-style remarks about the threat of “misinformation and AI.”
At the same time, she promoted controversial UN instruments like the Pact for the Future, its annex, the Global Digital Compact, and Global Principles for Information Integrity. A wide range of contentious policies are contained in these: digital ID, censorship aimed at “hate speech and misinformation,” enabling surveillance – while the latter also recommends algorithmic censorship and demonetization.
But the key point of Fleming’s address to students in Guadalajara this time was regulating AI, in terms of making sure it is “defending democracy from disinformation.”
To justify such grand plans – steering the development of an entire emerging tech sector in a “desired” direction – Fleming is once again unafraid of reaching for some remarkable scaremongering. The panel she spoke to about “the crisis of mis-and-disinformation in the world” was called, “The Day When AI Would Replace Democracy.”
And is that the “crisis in the world” that the UN should be so passionately focused on right now? Fleming thinks so. Apparently speaking for us all, she further raises the alarm about the “difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is not”… because of AI.
There’s another big problem that the UN is trying to tackle these days (no, once again, nothing concerning its core mission) – namely, the decline of trust in both institutions and (their) legacy media.
That sort of decline happens when autocracy, rather than AI, starts replacing democracy, but Fleming insists it’s the fault of “misinformation and AI.”
The UN official therefore pushes for “urgent AI regulation.” The UN instruments mentioned earlier are recommended as governance frameworks to do this. And they are promoted as ensuring “respect of human rights,” “prioritizing the needs of vulnerable populations,” and being “inclusive and equitable.”
