Brownstone Institute
President von der Leyen’s WEF Speech is Sheer Manipulation
From the Brownstone Institute
If there is one thing the past few years have taught us, it is that the people applying “misinformation” rules (e.g. the “fact-checkers”) are often the ones lying to or deceiving the public
In a recent address to the World Economic Forum, EU President Ursula von der Leyen, citing the WEF’s annual “global risk report,” pointed to “misinformation and disinformation” as the greatest risks facing the global business community at this time. These risks are “serious,” in her view, “because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing” – climate, demographics and technological changes, and “spiraling regional conflicts and intensified geopolitical competition.”
The answer to the risks of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” in President von der Leyen’s estimation, is for “businesses and governments” to “work together” to get a grip on the problem. Though von der Leyen does not use the word “censorship” in her address, the example she offers of businesses and governments “working together” is the European Digital Services Act, which imposes a legal requirement upon large online platforms like X/Twitter and Meta/Facebook to censor misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech.
Few would question the claim that artificial intelligence, bots, and various malicious actors can leverage social media and other digital “information highways” to confuse, disorient, and manipulate citizens. However, the President of the European Commission, like any smart politician, knows how to milk a crisis to expand her own power, and her January 16th speech at Davos was a tour de force in crisis manipulation.
She could have used her unique position of leadership to underline the true nature of the threat of disinformation, which is a threat coming from all directions – not just from malicious private actors, but from governments that run “information” campaigns designed to harness people’s primal instincts, most notably fear and solidarity, in support of their preferred policies. Ms von der Leyen could have used her platform to caution her audience about the dangers of handing the keys to the internet to a handful of poweful actors with an evident interest in silencing their critics.
But instead, acting in true political form, President von der Leyen presented an utterly self-serving, one-sided, and dishonest picture of the risks of “disinformation” and “misinformation,” reminiscent of the musings of a dictator. The general narrative she conveyed was that the purveyors of “misinformation” are throwing a spanner in the works of global cooperation, but that if businesses and governments just pull together, they can nip this avalanche of disinformation and misinformation in the bud. This narrative is wrong in so many ways:
- This naïve view of “us the world’s heroic business and political elite” and “them the nasty disinformation-producers” distracts attention away from the rather inconvenient fact that disinformation and misinformation show up on all sides of the political spectrum. There is no “global team” that can safely be entrusted with the task of quashing “misinformation.” If there is one thing the past few years have taught us, it is that the people applying “misinformation” rules (e.g. the “fact-checkers”) are often the ones lying to or deceiving the public, whether on the origins of the coronavirus, the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines, or some other issue of public importance.
- Given the fact that “misinformation” and “disinformation” is spread all over the political spectrum and not concentrated in the hands of a few easily fingered malicious actors, in practice the very perception of what counts as “misinformation” and “disinformation” often depends on one’s political interests and biases, and is not a morally or politically neutral category.
- Dictators and tyrants are quick to accuse their critics of “misinformation” and “disinformation” and to blur the dividing line between reasonable dissent and malicious “disinformation”- clearly, they recognize that the term has value as a vehicle of propaganda. Repeatedly seeking to silence one’s critics under the pretext that they are threatening democracy with “disinformation” is proper to dictators, not governors bound by principles of democratic accountability. A democratic ruler accepts that their policies may be publicly challenged, even if this slows down their implementation. A tyrannical ruler, on the other hand, is impatient with criticism and would prefer to just shut up their critics.
- Finally, the appeal to solidarity and cooperation in the fight against disinformation is rather disingenuous, to say the least, given that the example of public-private cooperation given by von der Leyen conspicuously involves coercive intrusion by EU bureaucrats in the moderation policies of online platforms. Nobody would suggest that online platforms are run by angels, or that their moderation policies are immune to criticism, but the whole narrative of “Let’s work together for the common good” falls to pieces when the main tool of “cooperation” is a piece of legislation (Digital Services Act) that enthrones a political elite and their employees as the coercive arbiters of truth and falsehood on the internet. This is a naked power grab by the European Commission and EU member-State governments, not “working together” with businesses to combat disinformation.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
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