AS WE are led down the garden path to Covid-19 endemicity, we are blindly entering what the Pied Pipers of the post-Covid International Order refer to as the infodemic – a World War Three of sorts on autonomous thought and free speech which is unlikely ever to end.
Under the umbrella of combating ‘dangerous disinformation’, every manufactured national security threat – be it Disease X, climate change or Vladimir Putin – will be steered with an unprecedented degree of precision, and not one by one but all at once.
Many of the pandemic architects-elite made it clear at the turn of the year what flavour 2022’s global war on terror will be.
Director General of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: ‘We all have a role to play to end this pandemic and infodemic,’ outright differentiating between the two threats as if one were Aids and the other cyber-terrorism.
Vaccine kingpin Bill Gates said the infodemic is one of the things he is ‘most worried about heading into 2022’, and that ‘social media has played a huge role in spreading misinformation that makes people suspicious of their governments. I believe that governments need to regulate what you can and can’t use social media for’.
Anthony Fauci told Radio Davos that: ‘One of the things that I believe the entire world is facing . . . is the amount of disinformation that is accompanying what should be a problem where everyone pulls together against the common enemy.’
Even Pope Francis began the year sermonising: ‘We can hardly fail to see that these days, in addition to the pandemic, an “infodemic” is spreading’, going on to condemn the ‘distortion of reality based on fear’ that he believes to be a violation of human rights.
At home, the draft for the forthcoming Online Safety Bill says: ‘The largest online platforms with the widest reach, including the most popular social media platforms, must address content harmful to adults that falls below the threshold of a criminal offence.’ No let-up in sight, then, to the hijacking of self-governance designed to inoculate us against all non-state-scripted narratives.
Whether by coincidence or design, on March 24 both the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) published pieces on disinformation which merged the global war on Covid-19, war in Ukraine, and the war on climate change. But given that BIT blogged as far back as 2014 that its chief executive, Professor David Halpern, had become co-chair of the WEF’s new council on behaviour – objective: ‘to increase awareness and understanding of behavioural insights amongst the WEF community’ – and that Halpern maintains a resume of sorts on the WEF website, I’m more inclined to think the timing is by design.
BIT’s offering, titled What Works in Disinformation Wars?(the WEF’s: Will the world clean up information pollution in 2022?) cheekily opens with the warning: ‘The Russian government is taking full advantage of its state-owned media outlets to spread false information about what Russian officials refer to as a “special operation” in Ukraine.’
Parallels to the work undertaken by the Cabinet Office’s unofficial Nudge Unit at the onset of the UK’s lockdown-phase of the pandemic are stark. After all it was BIT who advised the British Government to take full advantage of its state-controlled and regulated media outlets to promulgate artificial fear around the spread of a gain-of-function-created virus – the ‘special operation’ (read biological weapon release) we now know as Covid-19.
