Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 24/01/2023
Borut Batagelj from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana believes the tweet in a video shared by the National Sovereignty Institute is most likely forged.
The National Sovereignty Institute published on their website a post containing the claim that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called for the decriminalisation of sexual relations with children because laws against “age gap love,” more commonly known as paedophilia, “violate human rights”.
The post was shared on the Institute’s Facebook page on 14 January and subsequently shared in the Facebook groups We Are Not Giving Our Children, Slovenia Can Do It and Let’s Stop the Madness, which have a combined 85,300 members.
The WEF is a Swiss lobbying organisation that brings together political, business and academic leaders in efforts for a sustainable development of society. The organisation has not yet responded to a Razkrinkavanje.si request for comment, but in January they denied for Reuters and AFP that they have called for decriminalising paedophilia. They told Reuters the claim is completely made up and that they never made any statements of this kind.
The National Sovereignty Institute, which advocates Slovenia’s sovereignty, exit from the EU and NATO, and keeping the World Health Organisation and the WEF at arm’s length, shared in its post a link to a post about the same issue in English, published on 3 January by the American portal NewsPunch. This is a portal that regularly spreads false claims and disinformation according to fact-checkers that are like Oštro signatories of the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).
Both the Institute and NewsPunch added to their posts a video published at the time by The People’s Voice, an American portal for “alternative information”. The image used in the video preview is a montage of a photograph of WEF founder and executive president Klaus Schwab and an alleged WEF tweet claiming that “age gap love laws” violate human rights. In the text the reference was to paedophilia.
But neither Twitter nor the Internet Archive, where some deleted web content is available, contain any such or similar tweet by the WEF. What is more, the picture of the tweet does not contain the date of publication, which all tweets are equipped with.
Borut Batagelj, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, told Razkrinkavanje.si that both these things point to the tweet most likely being fabricated. He compared the alleged WEF tweet with an ordinary tweet for Razkrinkavanje.si to determine that the blue check mark right of the user handle is positioned higher than on original tweets, an additional indication that this is a montage.
NewsPunch frequently spreads conspiracy theories
The video containing the alleged WEF tweet spread on the video sharing platform Rumble, which has been found by journalists at Wired, an American magazine, to frequently serve up content that contains misinformation and conspiracy theories.
One of them is the so-called Pizzagate theory, which emerged in 2016, shortly before the US presidential election at which Donald Trump won. The Pizzagate theory claims that global elites are sexually abusing children in a Washington pizzeria with the support of the “deep state”.
Poynter, a media non-profit, determined in 2018 that NewsPunch was one of the spreaders of the Pizzagate theory. When it launched it was called YourNewsWire, but it changed the name and the domain after fact-checkers that are like Oštro signatories of the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) warned that the posts were not credible.
The claim that the World Economic Forum “calls for decriminalising sexual relations with children and say that ‘age gap love laws,’ better known as paedophilia, ‘violate human rights’” is false.