(LifeSiteNews) — The United Nations wants to “massively ramp up” its side of an “information war” against “misinformation,” U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming has declared.
In a speech to this summer’s Nobel Prize Summit, highlighted on X this week by podcaster Kyle Becker, Fleming said the U.N. has “teamed up with the platforms to elevate reliable information around COVID and climate, to amplify trusted messengers, and we have quite an army of them out there who want to take on content and promote it within their followings, and also educating users on how to slow the spread of disinformation,” she said, touting a new slogan for online information consumption: “pause, take care before you share.”
“We do feel like we are in an information war and that we need to massively ramp up our response,” Fleming said. “So we’re creating at the U.N. a central capacity to monitor and also have the ability to rapidly react when mis- and disinformation and hate speech is threatening not just our people, our operations, but also the issues and the causes that we’re working on.”
“But also we are going to be gearing up our verified initiative around climate change, and developing this U.N. code of conduct on information integrity on digital platforms, hoping to set global standards that we can all advocate around, so that we can collectively work for a more humane internet,” she added.
Fleming is accustomed to the U.N. enjoying a monopoly on the shaping of online climate discourse. Last year, she boasted to the World Economic Forum that “we partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources […] we own the science and we think that the world should know it.”
Fleming also complained that “almost anyone can promote disinformation for the price of a blue tick” since tech mogul Elon Musk purchased the platform formerly known as Twitter last year, and laid off so many content moderators that the U.N. has “no one to call to flag content that is abusive or even incitement to violence.”
After the acquisition, Musk laid off more than half the staff in hopes of reducing costs and increasing profitability, including cutting content moderators and replacing fact-checkers with a user-driven Community Notes feature. European Union regulators have called on Musk to hire more moderators, despite acknowledging that Community Notes accomplish the same result.
For years, the U.N. has advocated both government and private action to regulate online speech, which has put them at odds with Musk, a free speech advocate who purchased Twitter for the express purpose of making it more open and politically neutral. “The U.N. is more likely to cause, rather than prevent, disinformation,” he said in February in response to such calls from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
For example, climate experts have criticized the international body for falsely claiming that climate, weather, and water-related disasters increased by 500 percent over the past half-century. The anthropogenic global warming “consensus” – the view that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate – animating the body’s climate activism is based on widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings by their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.