During an interview, criticizing the U.S.’s lax approach to testing earlier in the year.
The most interesting part of the interview are Gates’s comments regarding his belief that companies should also monitor misinformation travelling via services like WhatsApp. Gates expresses a preference to increase monitoring and censorship of information travelling via these relatively more private channels in order for companies to intervene into issues as varied as anti-vaccine statements and child pornography. In addition to claiming that with regard to encryption of private messages, WhatsApp has made the process opaque, “In order to not have any responsibility.” Gates also drew upon his relatively in-depth experience working in the public health sector through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is intimately involved with the W.H.O., to criticize statements made by Elon Musk.
The interview with Bill Gates who unleashed COVID-19 upon the world.
Bill Gates, COVID-19, Conspiracy, Madness
Social media absolutely does play a vital role in the circulation of misinformation as well as other public nuisances. The issue, however, is that COVID-19 misinformation is not your average run of the mill misinformation. These are extremely extraordinary times with everyone hunkered down at home, with some people literally having claimed that these are the end times. Adding to the conspiracies, others have suggested Bill Gates is also attempting to chip and control everyone.
Misinformation shared about COVID-19 has the potential to lead to death, the further spread of the disease, as well as discrimination against communities or persons. From claims that people should drink bleach, run around without masks, or that one individual or community is responsible for the current global public health nightmare, actually creates a global health nightmare. Thus, social media companies are doing a pretty good job of clamping down on the public sharing of misinformation by amplifying high quality information.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates’s position on delving deeper into actual censorship of private communications is suspect in the case of misinformation. Such a tight clamping down would likely backfire and be seen as an authoritarian and draconian intervention into speech, though one certainly hopes that monitoring and enforcement are high in especially egregious criminal cases. The current system of regulating public information to provide intelligible and credible signals to non-conspiratorial persons, while permitting coordination among the more “creative” and imaginative of the population, ensures that their more ludicrous ideas do not gain more currency, coronavirus or otherwise.
Source: CNBC