Did the WHO push for censorship or was it YouTube/Google/others?

It was a novel time and things were changing daily. Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die. I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.

▲ stinkbeetle 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Did the WHO push for censorship or was it YouTube/Google/others?

Quite likely the WHO directly or by proxy with members who are also part of bureaucracy and governments in member states.

There is no question the WHO loves censorship and take an authoritarian approach to their "authority".

https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-world-health-organizatio...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/13/who-drops-cens...

If corporations start adopting policies that censor anything contradicting WHO, there would be a larger onus on a claim that they were not involved in that censorship action, in my opinion.

If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations, which is quite laughable to think but let's entertain the idea -- the WHO still should not have responded as it did with these knee jerk reactions, and also it should have been up to Google to ensure the did not use as their "source of truth" an organization that behaved in that way.

> It was a novel time

It wasn't really that novel since there have been centuries to study pandemics and transmissible diseases of all kinds, and there have even been many others of slightly less scale happen.

> and things were changing daily.

Things always change daily. Covid was not particularly "fast moving" at the time. It's not like new data was coming in that suddenly changed things day to day. It just progressed over the course of months and years. It appeared to be wild and fast moving and ever changing mainly because of the headless-chicken response from organizations like this.

> Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die.

People were very scared because of the fear campaign, and the imbecilic and contradictory responses from these organizations.

Not that it was nothing to be afraid of, but people should have calmly been given data and advice and that's it. Automobiles, heart attacks, and cancer kill lots of people too, and should be taken very seriously and measures taken to reduce risk but even so it would be stupid to start screaming about them and cause panic.

> I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.

It's not having data that is the problem, it is jumping the gun with analysis and findings and recommendations based on that data, then having to retract it immediately and say the opposite.

	▲	Jensson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations We actually has the emails the Biden administration sent to Youtube, here is a quote they sent: `"we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House"` That is a very clear threat. "We want to make sure you ...", and then saying this threat is done with the highest authority of the USA, so better get working on what we want. There are hundreds of such emails detailed in this report if you want to read what they sent to the different tech companies to make them so scared that they banned anything related to Covid: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...