World Health Organization Meets to Plot Censorship of “Misinformation” under International Pandemic Treaty
UNITED NATIONS, 19 Dec 2022
Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net - TRANSCEND Media Service
6 Dec 2022 – The unelected UN health agency inches closer toward being granted unprecedented, legally-binding censorship powers.
Members of the World Health Organization (WHO), an unelected international public health agency, are meeting to consider a draft version of a proposed international pandemic treaty which will give the WHO new powers to “tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” and be legally binding under international law.
The draft treaty contains various provisions in Article 16 (“Strengthening pandemic and public health literacy”) that require the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) to target so-called misinformation.
Member states are told to “conduct regular social media analysis to identify and understand misinformation,” design their own messaging to “counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news,” and manage “infodemics” (a phrase that was created by the WHO and describes “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak”).
While the provisions in Article 16 don’t directly call for member states to censor content that’s deemed to be misinformation, a provision in Article 14 (“Whole-of-government and other multisectoral actions”) paves the way for Big Tech to perform this censorship on the WHO’s behalf.
Under this provision, member states are required to collaborate with non-state actors and the private sector through an “all-encompassing whole-of-government, multistakeholder, multi-disciplinary and multi-level approach.”
Before this pandemic treaty existed, Big Tech willingly mass censored any content that it deemed to be “Covid misinformation,” even though there were no agreements or laws forcing them to do so. YouTube even introduced a far-reaching policy that made going against the WHO a violation of YouTube’s rules and deleted over 800,000 videos under this policy.
Under the pandemic treaty, the ties between governments and pro-censorship Big Tech companies will become even stronger and collaboration will be required.
We obtained a copy of the draft international pandemic treaty for you here.
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Tags: Censorship, Pandemic, Public Health, United Nations, WHO
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