Truth Police? WHO, Big Tech Team Up to Censor ‘Misinformation’

The World Health Organization has appointed itself the supreme arbiter of what constitutes online misinformation, with Big Tech, Google and its video arm YouTube acting as censors and enforcers.

By Rob Verkerk, Ph.D.

Would you trust the World Health Organization (WHO) as the ultimate arbiter when it comes to distinguishing online health-related misinformation from science-based, life-saving information?

The nearly 8 billion of us who currently inhabit planet Earth are being asked just that, to blindly accept this newly assumed role by the WHO, as supreme arbitrator of what constitutes online misinformation. With Big Tech, Google and its video arm YouTube, acting as censors-cum-enforcers.

WHO’s on a mission

Some might do well to ponder the consequences of this decision, one that has not involved a single democratic instrument or process, and one that drives a coach and horses through any remaining interest in the sanctity of free speech.

Let’s also consider the fact that the WHO is an unelected supra-national agency with intimate ties to an industry that is unequivocally known to be one of the most corrupt (see here, here and here).

On the WHO’s website, under the heading “Combatting misinformation online,” the agency states:

“WHO and partners recognize that misinformation online has the potential to travel further, faster and sometimes deeper than the truth — on some social media platforms, falsehoods are 70% more likely to get shared than accurate news.

“To counter this, WHO has taken a number of actions with tech companies to remain one step ahead.”

Given the WHO professes to be so science-based and has been handed the mantle as the ultimate arbiter, one wonders why it chose not to offer a citation for the research that underpinned the “falsehoods are 70% more likely to get shared” statement given this is its key justification for assuming such authority.

WHO’s feeble justification

Our research suggests the most likely evidence comes from a paper by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral from MIT entitled “The spread of true and false news online,” published in March 2018 in the journal Science.

The study was funded by a major Big Tech player, Twitter, and its central finding was that “falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.” I don’t wish to dispute the science used, just the context.

This work had little to do with concerns over health — it was all about questions around “fake news” during Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office.

Let’s drill down into the study a little and see just how relevant it is to the WHO’s decision to appoint itself as arbiter of online truth and falsity in relation to health.

The MIT scientists investigated around 126,000 rumor cascades on Twitter involving around 3 million people that were shared more than 4.5 million times. These covered the time from the inception of Twitter in 2006 through to 2017, neatly covering the pre-Trump era and very beginning of the Trump era.

Tweets were verified as true, false or mixed (partially true, partially false) with the veracity (or otherwise) of the tweets being based on fact checks by 6 “independent fact-checking organizations (snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegends.about.com).”

None of this involved the COVID-19 era, we don’t know how many health (please note: the word “health” does not appear even once on the paper).

In relation to the study’s relevance to health-related science or medical issues, the study is strongly biased towards an area that is irrelevant, namely political falsities, given these were reported as both the largest category studied and were three times more likely to be shared than other categories including science (that presumably is the silo in which health-related tweets were considered).

Drilling down even further, the study attempted to discover why it was that political falsities were more likely to be shared than true facts. The results distilled down to two primary emotions: novelty/surprise, and disgust.

In other words, quite different drivers from the broader range of emotions and drivers that drive our survival instinct that cause us to seek out information that helps us become or stay healthy. Such as whether or not taking ivermectin might help or hinder your chances if you were to contract COVID-19.

Selective fact-checkers

Twitter’s study that likely underpins the WHO’s main reason to usurp control over health-related information is perversely linked to decisions made by private “fact-checker” organizations that, in our view, have often misrepresented the facts when it comes to scientific and medical matters, especially around COVID-19.

A clear example concerns the role of ivermectin in the prevention or early treatment of COVID-19, and the way this topic was handled by Snopes in its article “Can Ivermectin Cure Coronavirus?” is entirely typical of other “fact-checkers.” Let’s dig in.

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