(DCNF)—Numerous speakers and panelists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) consistently emphasized the necessity of censoring “misinformation and disinformation” during the Davos conference held from Monday to Friday.
Top representatives from government, universities and nonprofits set their sights on this purportedly menacing threat in speeches and discussions throughout the summit. Many pressed for worldwide cooperation on combatting so-called misinformation, and advocated for the enforcement of specific censorship measures to stifle the dissemination of objectionable content online, particularly in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.
Breaking: WEF24 Davos is underway, and the speakers are already having a therapy session over @X and @elonmusk. Naomi Oreskes from Harverd Univeristy and Luciana Vaccaro from SwissUniversities lament on their experience on the "toxic" X platform and it's "problematic" owner,… pic.twitter.com/2hfmc38ATX
— Rukshan Fernando (@therealrukshan) January 15, 2024
For instance, European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen kicked off her “special address” on Tuesday by talking about how threatening “disinformation and misinformation” is to the world order.
“For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarization within our societies,” von der Leyen said to start her speech.
The EC president was citing the WEF’s recent Global Risks 2024 report, which surveyed more than “1,400 global risks experts, policy-makers and industry leaders” in September 2023 to determine what they perceive to be the most significant global risks in the near future. “Misinformation and disinformation” topped the list, with “societal polarization” ranking third; the report specifically flagged the risks in relation to the 2024 elections taking place.
“These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing,” von der Leyen continued. “We are once again competing more intensely across countries than we have in several decades. And this makes the theme of this year’s Davos meeting even more relevant. Rebuilding trust … This is a time to drive global collaboration more than ever before.”
EC Vice-President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourová said the EU is making sure individuals receive factual information through mandating censorship at Davos on Thursday during a panel on “Defending Truth.”
“Disinformation is a very powerful tool,” Jourová asserted. “[The EU is] focusing on improving of the system where the people will get the facts right. We don’t speak about opinions. We are not correcting anyone’s opinions or language. Yeah? This is about the facts.”
Jourová noted the EU’s 2022 “2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation” that compels numerous Big Tech signatories like Google and Meta to counter “disinformation” through measures like “fact-checking” and demonetization. The EC also referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its European External Action Service’s Strategic Communication Taskforce, which identifies and exposes “disinformation.”
A chief at an international nonprofit providing “support” to news organizations shared insights on a strategy for demonetizing so-called “bad” sources of information at the “Defending Truth” panel with Jourová.
“Disinformation makes money and we need to follow that money and we need to work with, in particular, the global advertising industry,” Internews President and CEO Jeanne Bourgault stated. “A lot of those dollars go to pretty bad content. So you can work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists just to really try to … focus their ad dollars toward the good news and information. The accurate and relevant news and information.”
Moreover, Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens called on Big Tech to up its online election censorship initiatives at the conference on Tuesday during a panel on “Protecting Democracy against Bots and Plots.”
“We’re in this bizarre environment where right as the threats are ticking up, the investments in actually doing the day-to-day work of online trust and safety for our information environment is being scaled back and is under attack,” Givens stated. “We have to have the social media companies keep up the work.”
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Twitter — now X — all reduced trust and safety personnel in 2023, according to Wired.
“Is there a way to force them to do that?” Foreign Policy magazine Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal asked Givens. “Push them to do that.”
“You get them to places like Davos, and you have them talk about the work,” Givens responded, laughing. “The staffing and decisions of companies, making sure they’re putting in those investments, making sure that they’re sharing information, that they’re doing it not just for the U.S. election but for the other elections … That has to stay a key focus. Even if there is political pressure.”
Givens noted “interventions” social media platforms have adopted, such as monitoring so-called misinformation and disinformation, asking users if they have read an article before they share it and fact-checking. She said these are “bare minimum” essentials for 2024.
Givens eventually said legislating censorship of “misinformation” is “dangerous territory” at the end of the panel discussion and noted the importance of “transparency” about content moderation decisions. The CDT pointed the DCNF to its content moderation transparency recommendations.
Furthermore, Harvard Professor of the History of Science Naomi Oreskes and President of swissuniversities Luciana Vaccaro disclosed their mutual dislike for billionaire Elon Musk’s X during a Monday forum on “Liberating Science.”
“For a long time I was on Twitter and now it’s become such a toxic place that I’ve concluded it’s not a worthwhile place to spend time,” Oreskes stated. “I have given up on X. What a scary name that even is, right?”
“It’s [a] very toxic environment and … I have no solution on that,” Vaccaro responded. “I think there will be a societal reflection on how information is brought there. Of course on X now there is also the policy of the owner that is problematic but I think this is a problem of the society of the future.”
Under Musk, X has reduced its total worldwide trust and safety staff, including employees and contractors, by 30%, from 4,062 to 2,849, according to a recent report by Australia’s eSafety Commission.
A reporter for Rebel News later pressed Oreskes on her X comments, asking her, “What’s wrong with X?”
“Where do I start?” she responded, laughing. “So much disinformation on that channel.”
The reporter asked if X should have more censorship, but Oreskes said she would not respond to that query.
Harvard, Internews, swissuniversities and the WEF did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.