January 16, 2024 - 5:10pm
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen today declared that “misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change.
“For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate,” she said in her speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. “It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies.”
The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to collaborate to quash disinformation. “Many of the solutions lie not only in countries working together but, crucially, on businesses and governments, businesses and democracies working together,” she said. “While governments hold many of the levers to deal with the great challenges of our time, business have [sic] the innovation, the technology, the talents to deliver the solutions we need to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation.”
To illustrate her point, von der Leyen mentioned the upcoming election-heavy year, calling it “the biggest electoral year in history”, and warned that bad actors may exploit the openness of democracies to influence elections with disinformation.
In the latest WEF Global Risk Report, misinformation and disinformation were ranked as a greater risk to the world than everything but extreme weather. Polarisation, the housing crisis, cyberattacks, economic downturn, supply-chain disruptions, and even nuclear war ranked beneath misinformation in the WEF risk report. Misinformation was rated more than three times higher in risk level than the erosion of free speech.
Fears about the democratisation of information have been an enduring theme at WEF conferences in recent years. Having been concerned by the threat of disinformation in the context of 2016 election interference and Covid-19, Davos attendees say they’re now focusing on the risks of AI.
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SubscribeThose lovely at EU HQ just wants best for poor dabs like you and me. They don’t want us worrying about difficult things that would mess with our pretty little heads.
They’ll such have a splendid news service called “Truth” I expect and will save us all a load of stress and aggravation.
I for my part am proposing to call Ursula every morning, to run my thoughts for the day past her. I want to ensure that they pass muster.
‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ are simply terms used to falsely justify the suppression of information that contradicts the narrative propagated by authoritarians (e.g. globalists/ communists/ fascists/ communitarians/ stakeholder capitalists/ EU/ WEF).
Agreed, and very well communicated!
Looks like they’ve got quite the task on their hands.
Yes, let’s ask government and business to decide what’s true and what isn’t on our behalf. I can’t see any problem with that.
After all, its well known that government and business never lie because neither has any political or financial motivation to do so.
Brilliant. Cheers Ursula.
They should make it easier on themselves and on us by releasing all their verified facts in a regular newsletter. They could call it “Truth”.
Very true. Pravda. Just what we need.
Yes; there were two newspapers in the USSR- the truth (Pravda) and the news (Izvestiya) – and the old Russian joke was; ‘there’s no truth in the news, and no news in the truth’ .
And just like the Soviet Union when you ask how you can vote this sinister woman out of office the answer comes that you can’t. You don’t get any choice. She is part of the unelected nomenklatura. But it doesn’t stop them wittering on about the need to protect democracy in those countries that vote in politicians that don’t tow the EU line sufficiently.
Elected by the European Parliament in secret ballot.
How did you chose your PM, Chancellor, or Foreign Secretary for that matter?
Ignorance and misinformation really doesn’t help.
The Russians do have their bad points, to be sure, but they do have a macabre sense of humour.
They confirmed a choice already made.
Pravda-UK has been operating for years, some people call it the BBC.
There speaks someone who’s always lived in a nice, pluralistic democracy.
She’s just working on generating the latest increase on EU scope and powers.
Just ask her and she’ll tell you that the answer is “more EU”.
I wonder what next years power grab will be.
I wonder if the EUs description of what the U.K. would look like if they voted to Leave will be considered the gold-standard of mis-information.
Great idea! They could also form a group of leading media outlets and call them The Trusted News Initiative led by the BBC, and include certain approved ‘news’ organisations from around the globe including such as AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post etc
After all they really proved their reliability to tell the whole unvarnished truth during the Covid pandemic and during recent wars.
The Trusted News Initiative is a great idea, but we must not forget they need to (and are working on) an Initiative to prevent the masses from accessing information that is not contained in their Trusted News Initiative.
She is an excellent example of media manipulation to continue false narratives by the “new aristocracy” so its funny to see her on the podium banging on about this. Ursula-I’m-a-paragon-of-propriety.
Her complete balls up at the ministry of German defence where only third of the air force was still flying and the German army went on exercise with broomsticks as they had no firearms was a national disgrace. Its terrifying that she has been suggested for the NATO chair role. All hushed up.
Her thesis for her doctorate was found to be 40-50% plagerised but because she looks good in slacks and has powerful friends it got smoothed over. All hushed up.
Covid vaccines in the EU and their production and distribution was a catastrophe with Italian & other police directed raids on vaccine production in the EU to stop movements to the UK. Quietly not mentioned.
The email and texts to defence flunkies to get sweet deals with no oversight which got “lost” and again loosing phones and things deleted when she did the same thing on Covid vaccines. Investigators complained of maladministration and destruction of evidence range from German parliament to the New York times. Ditto consultancy issues and the EU ombudsman complaints. Makes Bidens missing laptop look good. All hushed up.
My favourite is that EU protocol to become President requires the most votes internally, which went to Timmermans but due to shenanigans in East EU the unelected council put her in place though she was neither a candidate or took part in the election. Germany abstained on this as they didn’t want her either but when you’ve got enough pals in the back-rooms that’s no problem. So much for transparency.
On the board of the WEF in 2016/17, she’s a walking catastrophe but when you have pals in the media doing a Pravda job on you I’m sure she thinks she can walk on water. Because that’s what they do in the WEF.
She’s screwed up German defence, the EU and its NATO next but its OK because you’ll never hear anything about it.
We’re doomed.
This is part of her Wilki entry
“She was brought up bilingually in German and French, and moved to Germany in 1971 when her father became involved in German politics. She graduated as a physician in Hanover in 1987. After marrying fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen, she lived for four years in the United States with her family in the 1990s. After returning to Germany she became involved in local politics in the Hanover region in the late 1990s, and she served as a cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2005.”
How did someone so unqualified land the job?
Leaders the world over are really doubling down on the idea that people are questioning authority because of outside influences, rather than any real grievances.
I’ve opined before about how people become more vulnerable to absurd ideas not only because they are ignorant about an issue, and thus easy to fool – but also when too many in authority deny an issue even exists. The more often your reality is dismissed as a fantasy world, the more comfortable you may feel reaching for something fantastical.
Rather than obsess over unfavourable information, leaders should work harder to improve people’s lives so that unfavourable assertions lose credibility.
The mindset of people like von der leyen is that their own narrative couldn’t possibly be wrong, and therefore those who question or challenge are necessarily mad, bad, or lying. And, moreover, if they need to simplify or emphasise aspects of their messaging to counter what they see as emotive disinformation perhaps at the expense of technical accuracy then that’s a price worth paying. For example, “net zero” at any cost, and “safe and effective”. This hardens what might once have been one of any number of reasonable interpretations of a volatile, uncertain, complex and highly ambiguous reality into an unshakeable but fragile ideology and belief system.
Once they start off down this road it incredibly hard to back. The groupthink reinforces itself, as adherence to the ideology and denigration of outsiders who question it is reinforced by their overriding need to remain in their chosen, powerful, ingroup. This goes for their so-called technical advisors and “scientists” as much as does for the politicians at the top of the pecking order (the ingroup has a steep hierarchy). The rhetoric gets more extreme and certain in order to promote public “confidence” in it; inaccuracies, half-truths and outright lies are told in salved conscience on this supposedly noble basis – it’s for the greater good. The ingroup progressively adopts and attempts to implement increasingly extremist policy positions in order to demonstrate the validity of a rhetoric that departed from reality some time ago. Sometimes, the policy collapses almost on first contact with reality, for example the idea, put about by the communist buffoon-led WHO that the only “way out” of what he chose to call the “pandemic” was to “vaccinate” literally everyone on earth because, of course, no one is safe until everyone is safe. In other cases, it takes longer, for example any one of many of the unsustainable fantasy-land “net zero” policies that the ingroup like to push.
Subconsciously, it’s possible that she others like her know that they’ve stretched the facts too far; that the rhetoric and the policies have become too extreme; that they are losing the public’s trust; that they are in fact the cause and source of the problem as much as any loudmouth narcissistic fantasist on the “other side”; and that the vast majority of those who question or criticise them are neither bad, mad, nor dangerous. But there’s no turning back without a loss of face, and probably their jobs. And so it goes.
OK – that is pure 1984 rule book; rule Number 1.
That any thinking person who watched that huge crime against humanity we call covid response, and the stealing of the 2020 elections, and the 100% capture of the Mainstream Media, the Education System, the Entertainment Industry, Political Parties (uniparty) – anyone who reads the above and does not know this is the Kinetic beginning of the 5th generational WWIII against humanity from the Global Elites, then you are the sign they are winning. (the ‘Lizards‘ as ‘Salty Cracker’ calls them, or more colourfully, ”Kid Fuc***g Lizard People”)
This is a Broadside fired right at the hull-line of the ship of freedom – please let us not just take it and keep taking it till we go under.
Has the ready availability of conspiracy-churning news driven you stark, staring mad – is that your problem?
Or are you just trying to wind up the UnHerd readership (not a challenging task). Now, where’s champagne socialist hiding?
Ursula von der Leyen: misinformation is world’s gravest problem
So this will be the last we’ll hear from you, then?
Sadly not.
Mr Big Bad WOLF* recently “hoovered up” her pet Shetland Pony, and she is somewhat annoyed.
(* Now happily living in the High Alps in Switzerland according to my spies.)
Yeah, war, disease and poverty are far smaller problems than misinformation.
My first thought was, this speech by the EU head is nonsense, the harder the authoritarians liberals try the more ridiculous they sound. Thus the harder their fall eventually.
However there could be a more sinister angle, is this the first step to eliminating Twitter before the next Presidential election campaign?
But there is no election for EU President – isn’t it wonderful !
But I see you mean the US president. Doubt if anything airhead Ursula says is going to move the needle here.
Members of the Irish parliament were saying much the same about this “misinformation threat” following the attack on young school children in Dublin.
I suspect a coordinated message by authoritarian liberals across the EU. If they can implement a twitter ban by mid summer that would make it simpler for the Biden administration to claim a “demonstrable need” for the same in the US. Even without US intervention it would be a personal financial attack on Elon Musk.
I am on board with the general thrust of all this, but frankly, anyone giving grief to Elon Musk is ok by me.
Jealousy is a dangerous emotion.
Well that reads like a less than subtle hint that a crackdown on free speech is coming (if they can get away with it).
“We had to destroy free speech in order to protect it.”
“Free speech is so important that it must be surrounded by a bodyguard of not being allowed to speak freely at all.”
Dreaming up such nonsense is even for Ursula a major effort. Is this the beginning of the end?
Let me guess, it’s the EU that will be the arbitrator of truth. These people are clowns. The sooner they are gone the better it will be for all of us.
Just like St Jacinda of the antipodes. Why does it always seem to be women leaders (I use the term loosely) who say ‘trust me and only me’.
Well, there is Mr Trudeau.
Like he said women leaders
We’re doomed!
Now, can you do that like Fraser from Dad’s Army?
Aye.
As with the Reformation, the clerical class demand that they are the sole source of truth. But we’re way, way beyond that. Think about the amount of content generated now compared to twenty five years ago,
Then – 1999 – content production was a specialised task done by a small number of professionals. A business might produce a brochure for a product or an ad and a press release and that was it. Government would produce their reports with regular monotony but it took tedious committee after committee to get them out. Journalists and novelists were the only people who published for the public. The majority of ordinary people never produced anything for anyone other than family to read or see.
Now look at the scale of content from social media and self-publishing and just people out with a phone as a camera. I have no numbers, but this is the Internet, so I guess that there is more content produced in a minute than ever was produced in a year in 1999. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. There is no time or space for expert assessment.
AI is going to make the content even bigger and even more scary (and has as fake images in warzones show). All information has to be treated skeptically because anyone now can have images and opinions and put them out for public consumption. Likelihood of truth is something we have to learn to judge by ourselves – not something that can be determined by a clerical class.
If only someone would leak those Pfizer emails, this blonde dumkopf would be toast.
Which Pfizer emails?
He means the text messages which were ‘misplaced’ which show that she bought 900 million doses of Pfizer vaccines having negotiated the deal by phone.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-find-texts-with-pfizer-chief-vaccine-deal-letter-2022-06-29/
Ursula von der Leyen is the greatest threat
Well I think when you have been proven to lie about everything, create government mandates that are ripped up as soon as in power, and total lies about wars like Iraq, and then about things like Covid, then 2008 banking crisis, just to name a few, you lose credibility. I think this is done to bring in global government, but no one trusts the WEF, WHO the UN. The power needs to be removed and we need to start again, and go back to basics!
“The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to collaborate to quash disinformation”.
That’s already in progress in the USA.
Contrary to what you might have learned from dubious misinformation sources, the EU is just a trading bloc.
We wish! If that was all it was, Britain might well have remained in it!
I’m hoping that is irony you are using ….
Isn’t it interesting how she’s more concerned about the effects on big business rather than EU citizens:
““misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change.”
And what about us ?
But of course – she doesn’t have any voters !
And for the plebs, she’s more worried about “polarisation within our societies”. Almost as though she’s not very keen on free speech if the thought police don’t approve. I wonder if she’s ever considered whether illegal immigration into Europe – about which she’s basically done nothing – might have created more polarisation along with the diversity.
Well, it would be a lot easier for her if the citizens of European countries were fully aligned with the EU in all regards.
This speech was given at the World Economic Forum. Ursula von der Leyen was speaking to an audience composed of the leaders of the global business community, not of EU citizens.
We do live in 2023 where all of the citizens of the EU can read her speech.
I am continually astounded at how insulated these people are from the rest of society.
Let’s magnanimously suppose they genuinely mean to do this in a fair and impartial way. Have they ever considered the optics of a bunch of wealthy, powerful elites showing up to an elite pro-global business forum and warning that, unless elite government official and elite businesspeople team up and suppress certain speech, the consequences of the proles believing fake news is worse than climate change or war?
They are dumb, but not quite as dumb as they seem. Ursula von der Leyen is largely just reading from a WEF report. If you look at the report, they say that misinformation is the biggest threat in the near term (the next two years). In the longer term it drops to sixth place, with climate change being number one.
Their reasoning is that there are big elections coming up in India, the US and the UK in the next two years. They claim that the use of deep fakes and other AI-generated misinformation during elections could create chaos and turmoil as candidates claim that elections were stolen and governments lose legitimacy. Similar to what has happened in the US over the last three years, but writ larger.
I think it’s all a bunch of bunk, but at least there is some thought behind it.
These people sincerely believe that they are the custodians and guardians of truth, and all the problems of the world stem from those who would defy or undermine their wisdom.
It’s that or they are just power-mad liars.
Would like to see an example of what they consider ‘misinformation.’ Anything which threatens the inviolable sanctity of the European Commission?
Well she’s not wrong. Words are powerful because they are the gateway to ideas and meaning. Still, they may as well dump their Euros into the ocean as trying to fight misinformation. After Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in Germany, the Catholic Church proceeded to spend the next century trying to reestablish their dogma as the one universal ‘truth’ of Christendom. What followed was a century of conflicts fought over basically nothing. A hundred plus years later, they finally realized they weren’t going to win, and sensibly gave up. All they managed to accomplish was get a bunch of people killed and tortured for no reason. Let’s not do that again.
She really would make a great movie villain. Ursula – Queen of the undead.
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” Albert Camus
Not to worry the citizens of the EU can vote her out at the next election. Can’t they?
For goodness sake. If the people of the EU don’t like her they can just vote her out. Oh wait….
The peasants are heading to the castle with pitchforks and barrel staves and their betters have decided the first thing to do is mandate silence. Further mandates will follow.
Dolores Umbridge has thoughts about what we should be allowed to write and say.
These people are almost-comically evil. Almost.
Since governments are the chief purveyors of mis- and dis-information, the solution is obvious…shrink the role of government. Government should be a boring background activity providing a neutral scaffolding of security from violent coercion and fraud. It should not be engineering society, merely serving it. Then we could have part time politicians and virtually no bureaucracy. Oh yes, that does mean Ursula Van-der-Crazy would be out of a job!
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Unfortunately, Lord Acton didn’t have specific insights into power in a kakistocracy.
The EU, WEF, Davos are the biggest threats in the world imo.
VdL is misinformation personified. She’s forced down everyone’s throat so insistently however that the number choking on it continues to rise. Threatening to blow her while game away.
All bullshit. of course
Typically when the EU wants to ban something, it means they want a monopoly on it.
There’s so much wrong with her worldview, it’s hard to know where to start.
I’ll begin with complete indifference for the slaughter of young men by our ruling elite. Misinformation is a bigger threat than war? I guess so if you’re an aging female sociopath, who I’m betting does not have sons enlisted in the military.
What a perverse ghoul.