During the corona crisis, the Ministry of VWS was concerned that misinformation would cause people to have wrong thoughts. They might believe that a secret society of government officials, communication experts, doctors, scientists, bloggers and columnists would influence the media so that they would not or hardly see some messages.
To prevent people from harboring such misconceptions, the ministry set to work a secret society of government officials, communications experts, doctors, scientists, bloggers, and columnists to ensure that the public would not or hardly notice some of the messages. come across.
The secret society was called a “think tank.” It had been around since 2017, when the vaccination coverage had fallen from about 95 percent to 92 percent in a few years and Minister Blokhuis (VWS, ChristenUnie) started an offensive. When the corona crisis broke out, the biggest concern from day one was to control the information provision. And what works better than such an intricate network of authoritative, confidence-inspiring think-tank members?
It is currently unclear who participates in this government-initiated information manipulation and who decides which information is desirable and undesirable. In any case, it has a major influence on the public debate. For example, for a long time it was impossible to freely discuss the origin of the corona virus. Social media companies labeled the possibility that the virus had sprung from a lab accident as disinformation. When the World Health Organization sent a team to Wuhan to investigate just that possibility, the bans and blocks were quickly reversed. The hypothesis turned out to be not only reserved for wappies.
The information campaign reminded me of recently NRCresearch in which it became clear that the General Trade Journal published information from the security services in the newspaper during the Cold War. Against the unfree propaganda of the communist ideal state, it was also permitted to use one’s own independent press for secret state information.
The corona pandemic broke out at a time when the establishment had also become convinced that we were in a kind of Cold War. An information war between facts and alternative facts, pro-science and anti-science, news and fake news. How else would Americans have dreamed of voting for Trump? That had to be based on a misunderstanding put in place by the Russians. How could Brexit happen? Correct. Lies and deception, via Facebook, Cambridge Analytica – that was the only way, wasn’t it? If those Brexit voters had had the correct information, they could never have made the wrong choice.
You will no longer find the editors of traditional media in conclave with the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. But employees of social media platforms appear very willing to contribute to the efforts of the ministry to promote correct information. And for that they no longer have to use such horse products as before. They can now simply render information algorithmically harmless. The opposite of ‘Search Engine Optimization’. You simply let it disappear into the depths of the internet.
One of the members of the think tank is Ted van Essen, who holds weekly consultations with the program Time for max. He sees no harm in it. The think tank follows science, and whoever does not follow that is, according to doctor van Essen, “loose from God”. According to van Essen, that scientific truth is that absolute.
It is precisely the last bearers of trust in society, doctors and scientists, who allow themselves to be put to work by VWS. But they forget one thing: information is always less important in how people make choices than trust in the authorities the information comes from. And if anything gets damaged by this kind of covert manipulation, that’s it. The trust.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 29, 2023.