WHO Bragged About Helping Big Tech Control What You See About Covid, And It’s Still Happening
Threads, the app Meta rolled out as a competitor of X (formally known as Twitter), was recently caught censoring content related to Covid. In an article published Monday, The Washington Post reported that when users search for Covid content, Threads generates “a blank screen that showed no search results and a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Likewise, when I searched for Covid content on Instagram’s “Reels,” “Tags”, and “For you” search sections, I was met with a CDC pop-up and, below that, two “trusted resources,” the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
The return of Covid censorship comes as the corporate media, Democrats, health bureaucrats, and left-wing celebrities are re-upping Covid fear and hysteria.
The federal and global health bureaucrats know that, like the seasonal flu, there will always be new variants of Covid. They can’t hide from the obvious realities that lockdowns did more harm than good, masks are ineffective, and vaccines and the never-ending boosters do not prevent people from contracting or transmitting Covid. Yet to keep their harmful policies on life support, they’ve spread lies and waged censorship campaigns for three years now.
The UN and its subsidiary, the WHO, are guilty of spreading some of the most harmful Covid disinformation, suppressing accurate data, and smearing dissenting views, so why has it been named the arbiters of truth on everything Covid by Meta? And why is Covid information subject to so much censorship (again)?
To answer these questions we need to evaluate the United Nations’ initial response to Covid-19 and its exploitation of fear to achieve its broader global governance aims, as outlined in Whitney Webb and Iain Davis’ investigative report “SDG16: Part 1 — Building the Global Police State.”
The UN’s Covid Content Moderation
In their report, Webb and Davis recount how in 2020, the UN Department of Global Communications launched the “Verified” campaign, which seeks to “partner with United Nations agencies and country teams, influencers, civil society, business and media organizations to distribute trusted, accurate content and work with social media platforms to root out hate and harmful assertions about COVID-19.”
There is no indication on Verified’s website that the campaign ceased operations. The UN has already proudly admitted to conspiring with Big Tech companies to alter search results, as we are seeing now on Instagram. The WHO has even bragged about “working with more than 50 digital companies and social media platforms including TikTok, Google, Viber, WhatsApp, and YouTube to ensure that science-based health messages from the organization or other official sources appear first when people search for information related to COVID-19. “
While we do not have access to internal communications between tech giants like Meta and the UN, it’s not unreasonable to conclude the UN is still involved in the latest Covid censorship, given its history of meddling in content “moderation” and the fact that Instagram only provides two UN-linked accounts under “trusted sources.”
‘We Own the Science’
Of course, the UN and the Verified campaign specifically are not inerrant entities on Covid or anything else. Verified claims on its website that mass vaccination is the way to “end the pandemic.” This statement defies the reality that vaccines do not prevent people from contracting or transmitting Covid and it purposefully ignores the efficacy of natural immunity.
Science is never settled because people are fallible. Over the centuries of human existence, our collective understanding of the world we live in has evolved dramatically. Unlike true thinkers, the UN is not interested in learning from or debating with anyone. When discussing search result manipulation, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming stated plainly, “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.”
No one can “own” science. What Fleming really means is that the UN owns the narrative, and she’s right.
Revoking ‘Human Rights’ to Control the Narrative
Why is the UN so willing to trample on social media users’ free speech? The UN famously introduced the idea of “human rights” in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unlike the “inalienable rights” acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, Webb and Davis explain that so-called “human rights” are considered to be given to people by the government, not God, and can consequently be taken away.
Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the quiet part out loud: that human rights can be revoked on grounds of protecting “public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”
We saw the willful revocation of these rights in action in 2020, when the UN published a document titled “COVID-19 and Human Rights,” claiming “national emergencies may require limits to be placed on the exercise of certain human rights.”
By branding freedom of speech a “human right,” the UN justifies taking it away. The same document says that the UN “welcome[s]” “flags and takedowns of misinformation” and emphasizes the importance of giving “prominence to reliable information,” meaning algorithmic manipulation, like shadowbanning and boosting.
What constitutes mis- and disinformation? In the eyes of the UN, “anything that erodes ‘trust’ in the UN—in its ideas, policy agendas, agencies and ‘stakeholder partners,’’’ write Webb and Davis.
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
The UN stated in April 2020 that Covid “presents a unique opportunity to course-correct and begin to tackle long-standing public policies and practices that have been harmful for people and their human rights.” In other words, the UN is only too excited to use the excuse of pandemic response to implement its openly globalist agenda.
Accordingly, the censorship and suppression campaign playing out on Instagram and elsewhere is an exercise in control over the masses. The UN and its partners in Big Tech are unwilling to relinquish the control they grabbed during the height of Covid mania, and they are evidently trying again to foment fear over a disease that’s comparable to the seasonal flu for most people.
[Read: If You Were A Sheep During Covid, Admit You Were Wrong And Do Better Next Time]
The “COVID-19 and Human Rights” document goes on to claim that “securing compliance depends on building trust.” Unfortunately for the UN, we know the truth about Covid. It does not warrant denying citizens’ rights via mandates or censorship (nothing does). That was true in 2020 and it’s true today. As long as people know the truth, they’ll see through the UN’s fear campaign — that’s precisely why the UN has to rely on censorship to secure the trust and “compliance” it desperately seeks.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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