Through controls of news outlets on restrictions on the distribution of leaflets in more extreme cases it was regulations on speech and even thought ancient Rome suffered through this during the reign of Tiberius the French Revolution had its law of suspects communism was defined by its paranoid states that restricted both speech and
Thought now in all of these the narratives tend to be the same censorship was to protect us against the threats to society and those pesky threats were always those who spread lies those who spread dangerous ideas they were the counter-revolutionaries the people whose very beliefs were a threat to Public Health
And the results in almost all these cases were usually the same just as George Orwell imagined his book 1984 well the ministry of truth becomes the factory of Lies you think we learn from all this that the lessons from history would show us the outcomes of censorship but if the
Pre-marxist philosopher Frederick Engel said anything of value it might have been this the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic a new Global policy was uncensorship was promoted it was the infodemic the information pandemic the World Health Organization made a
Call to action to fight the infodemic in April of 2020. it described this as quote it’s an overabundance of information some accurate some not that is spreading alongside the covid-19 pandemic it described this as a type of information stating that like the virus it is highly contagious and grows exponentially it also complicates
Covid-19 pandemic response efforts who director Tedros even went a step further and said this we’re not just battling the virus we’re also battling the trolls watch misinformation makes the job of our heroic health workers even harder it’s diverting the attention of decision makers and it causes confusion and
Spreads fear to the general public just battling the virus we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response and of course this is not just empty talk it rolled out a global plan for infodemic management and similar product protocols became policy not just for businesses
But for governments as well YouTube began putting alerts on covet misinformation at the bottom of videos Twitter and Facebook were actually deleting content directly the White House even put pressure on social media platforms to censor quite a few people actually but in particular those they labeled as the disinformation Dozen for
Their online posts about covet 19. watch the White House Press Secretary at the time Jen sackey publicly call out the the platforms on this there are also proposed changes that we have made to social media platforms including Facebook there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine
Misinformation on social media platforms all of them remain active on Facebook despite some even being banned on other platforms including Facebook ones that Facebook owns and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful uh violated posts posts that will be within their policies for removal often remain
Up for days that’s too long the information spreads too quickly now look we later learned from the Twitter files that there were in fact real actions taken to sense of these people online and only now are we learning something else it turns out much of what was censored turned out to
Be true and as for the public narratives and what was true well we learned that much of it was not true history repeated itself the attempts to eliminate lies ended up crushing truth and instead of allow and instead allowed real falsehoods to thrive meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually talked
About this he admitted it in a recent podcast of Lex Friedman watch you just take some of the stuff around covet earlier on in the pandemic where um there were you know real Health implications but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions and you know unfortunately I
Think a lot of the kind of establishment done that um you know kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and you know asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being you know more debatable or or true and that stuff is really tough right really undermines
Trust scientific assumptions is it science if it’s an assumption look this failure in information was later explained as just being how science is it changed over time the initial findings are not the final ones this is former niaid director Anthony fauci saying so in September of 2022 watch what happened is that
Knowledge evidence and data evolved and as it evolves you have to be flexible enough to change and that’s what science is all about it’s a self-correcting process so how has it evolved well we know now it turns out the face masks just plain old were not effective the lockdowns did
Not work the vaccines were in fact not 100 percent effective or safe in other words real information was censored scrutiny of so-called science was forbidden and while the world was forced to bow down to policies and mandates based on science that well was just plain old untrue real information
Was forbidden given this history we would expect the world to learn a key lesson that the free flow of information is the lifeblood of a free Society public scrutiny is what maintains the Integrity of Truth and when the public is stripped of this right what happens the foundations of Truth they come
Falling down but look history always seems bound to repeat itself the World Health Organization as we speak right now is working to get Global authority to manage pandemics and in the new guidelines on the preparedness and resilience for emerging threats well the infodemic is back it states it is a form of community
Protection it needs a form of infodemic management as well as collaborative surveillance it states this infodemic cannot be eliminated it can only be managed this is why wh Joan Partners have developed the approach of infodemic management and armed with new capabilities for the job it describes these as tools and approaches for social
Listening and that includes in notably artificial intelligence that monitors social media as well as other systems such as experts for Community engagement now the problem of course isn’t so much about official sources and so-called credible sources the problem is when the official and credible sources are no longer held to public scrutiny a
Monopoly on fax may sound appealing look maybe it can help get rid of fake information and look I would agree Aces Society based on truth will be a wonderful thing but the problem with truth is that there are often many views which arguably some have some degree of Truth within them
And few people if any can ever demonstrate complete truths You’ll Always Find gaps You’ll Always Find bias in perspective but look there’s an even greater problem with this it’s in who gets to be the gatekeeper for truth who gets to make the calls and what is true and what is
False how can you ensure this Monopoly will not get seized for special interest we risk falling to the same problem as communist Nations where state-run media become The Gatekeepers of public information and the Soviet Union the official paper Pravda they were the approved truth when public scrutiny is
Forbidden this is bound to cause two problems in logic is something False only because it’s a risk to the the official narrative can we believe something is true only because we’re told so scrutiny is what reinforces truth and without scrutiny while truth will always rest on shaky grounds
Folks stay tuned after the break we’re speaking with Hans monkey co-host of Truth over news about the Trump indictment
