World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus used the UN agency’s Summit 2024 to launch into yet another tirade against online “misinformation/disinformation.”
The WHO’s contribution against that threat, Tedros said, was countering it by “working” with a number of companies and other partners.
In his speech, the WHO chief repeated the many-times heard accusations against social media as “turbo-charging” the spread of misinformation which then added to people’s skepticism toward vaccines and some other medical treatments.
Tedros added to this the “stigma, discrimination, and even violence” toward health workers, but also “marginalized groups,” allegedly all a result of said disinformation.
This one has also been heard many times from various politicians and affiliated media: that disinformation was “almost as deadly” as the virus (we’re talking coronavirus, not smallpox here).
But still, Tedros states that disinformation regarding the pandemic, lockdowns, masks, etc. – or what he considers to be misinformation, was indeed “deadly.”
Now that the problem has been presented in such a dramatic way, the “solution,” however drastic, should be an easier pill to swallow. And the solution is, basically, Big Tech and government(s) censoring free speech.
Tedros speaks about the need for the WHO to be trusted, and trustworthy, but the way he proposes to go about this is baffling, as it involves calls to government and tech and social media companies “to prevent the spread of harmful lies and promote access to accurate health information.”
Some of the biggest of them – and essentially all governments around the world – have been carrying censorship of this kind for years, pointing to the WHO as a reliable source and earnestly removing massive amounts of content as misinformation, even when it later turned out to be true.
With that in mind, it’s difficult to understand what more Tedros would like done (and how), but it might have to do with shoring up support (by shutting up opponents) for the WHO Pandemic Treaty, which is currently being negotiated.
The WHO director-general mentions “misinformation” as a factor that is undermining those negotiations, because of the claims that the end-goal of the treaty is to take decision-making during pandemics away from sovereign nations.
