It’s not about having a monopoly on good information. It’s about a monopoly on attention. What use is it if the WHO is wrong and someone else is right, but everybody listens to the WHO?
Censorship is a big problem.
I'm slightly disturbed by the casualness of this thread actually. The WHO is not merely some random organisation, one of many providing information in an open environment. It commands the loyalty of many powerful people who just automatically assume it is correct, and as such has proven basically unkillable. Trump realised it was corrupted and tried to defund it, that lasted right up until Biden rolled everything back. Other countries have also been defunding it which is why the Gates Foundation is now such a large donor. How should society handle an organisation that is so clearly inadequate and even dangerous yet which commands blind adherence from the richest and most powerful people in the world, people who can and do seriously interfere with the flow of information?
This is also one of the reasons I have argued vigorously against over-regulating tech companies and their moderation practices: they deserve the chance to shoot themselves in the foot with gusto, and lose or win credibility with their user base dependent upon how they react to societal changes. It is a slow painful process, but society is developing antibodies to their practices and there are no shortcuts, no regulatory equivalent of an mRNA vaccine that won’t just turn a privileged few into quasi-public entities. If we can avoid doing that, social networks will likely go through a cycle of fragmentation over time that will counteract any kind of centralized planning or coordination between a few big giants.
So what do we do about the WHO? You’re asking the wrong question there. Do what you did to protect yourself and your loved ones this time and recognize, as was obvious since at least February 2020, that the WHO isn’t to be taken as the source of truth on anything. It’s an offshoot of a diplomatic forum and acts like it because that is its nature. Even if the rank and file are doing good work, the officers are from countries that don’t trust each other, and have interests other than what their official role is. That doesn’t render it completely useless, but it isn’t completely useful either. You can’t control what allegiances other people have, only account for them.
As for the WHO, I wish I could simply ignore them as easily as I ignore what Facebook do. Facebook's power is limited to doing stuff on their platforms, more or less, and whoever they can influence via that. The WHO directly commands national governments who then command the rest of us. Dysfunction at that level filters down to the whole world.
That all sounds like a great idea but inevitably it turns out the purportedly enlightened organizations, like everyone, are not always right.
Perhaps it’s an insight into how life must have been when religious dogma ruled the world.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/46573762/why-is-yo...
Like my sibling poster said, it probably triggered the "covid hoax" spidey senses. People are not rational in these times. They're emotional and won't even listen enough or think enough to understand the difference between looking at facts and discussing them vs. calling it a hoax. Covid is very real. I know from multiple close friends affected. I was also told via official channels that anyone obese would dare badly and die. Anecdotal data: Yet some very obese friends made it through without more than a few mild symptoms. Months later new research came out that said being sedentary is much worse than being obese. This friend while being obese is very active. No car, walks everywhere, physical labour job etc. Just telling this story would probably get me banned on certain sites.
1. A situation becomes political, and all kinds of claims are made by demagogues without evidence in order to score points, based on whatever they would like to be true.
2. There is lots of arguing, and subtle points like “we don’t know enough to know the truth yet but X seems practical/probable” get attacked by all sides or used by the people from 1 to show how much they are being silenced or to generate conspiracy theories.
3. Eventually the reality of the situation becomes mostly clear, and the people who happened to jump to the right conclusion without evidence use it to recruit more followers, and the people who were wrong don’t want to give an inch because it benefits the group who were right for the wrong reasons.
In the end most people get more polarized and there is no clear way to short circuit the process.
The people who spread G5 and chip theories are a very small group compared to the rest of the skeptics, yet they are portrayed by the mass media etc. as one and the same. This is reflected in how many people deal with people who criticize the official story.
We seem to have lost all logic and critical thinking. There is no room for healthy discussions anymore. Instead people are personally attacking each other.
In general this seems to happen to all moderate discourse during highly political events, to the point where I almost feel like it's a strategy part of the time.
I'm not saying the general public, only a wider range of people who are less susceptible to being spun probably is enough of the population to swing the ultimate public views.