The World Economic Forum (WEF) continues its vocal “anti-disinformation” campaign, urging governments, media, tech companies and civil society to all join in.
WEF’s apparent rationale is that “disinformation” is a threat to “our ecosystem” and wants “experts” to explain how to “curb it.” (Pity WEF hasn’t asked some experts to first define disinformation – and explain how to arrive at a broad consensus in society and politics about that definition).
Instead, the informal group representing global elites is giving a nod to the EU and its EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), some of the key components of which are making critics call it “the censorship law.”
A post on the WEF site blames digital technology and what it calls “fragmented media ecosystem” for the supposedly unprecedented amounts of disinformation. Some AI fear mongering is peppered in – that’s these days par for the course.
And it isn’t the old media undermining its own standing, trust-wise, by readily “coordinating” with governments and engaging in biased reporting and censorship, that’s to blame for the steady erosion of trust not just in legacy media, but in those institutions as well.
No – the WEF’s narrative is nothing if not consistent. The reason, it insists, MUST be “disinformation.” And for the media to be trusted again, a society-wide “war on misinformation” needs to be taking place.
One would naively think that a media outlet’s most valuable asset is – information. But the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal shared with the WEF it’s in fact “trust” – i.e., influence, via disseminating information that never gets questioned.
Trust is mighty, but fragile; it is earned, not imposed and mandated, like the EU and others are trying to do time and time again; but trust is also easily lost, especially after years of free speech suppression, blatant partisanship, and the like.
But the Switzerland-based group insists the underlying problem is simply “disinformation” allegedly, now massive quantities of it.
So the WEF wants the most powerful forces in a society to close ranks and put up “a multi-layered defense against the spread of false information.”
And they’re not defending themselves, folks – they’re defending “truth.”
That was the name of a panel at the recent Davos meeting, where EU bureaucrats and New York Times and WSJ head honchos et al, got passed off as “truth experts.”
