EDITOR, The Tribune.

If the Bahamas and other nations were to be honest to themselves, COVID-19 could have been handled far better than today.

The only reason for this disaster is not only placing political interests above human lives, but a military-style disinformation campaign against healthcare experts by other people or organisations willing to extend the pandemic and create more chaos to meet financial goals and gain more power.

First it was defying lockdown mandates in the first few months of the pandemic, which eventually ruined recovery efforts at the end of Summer 2020 and made lockdowns less effective in the long run.

Secondly, the vaccination rates plummeted thanks to further efforts from anarchist type groups on social media who falsely portray themselves as doctors and healthcare experts. These efforts have further set recovery efforts back and have also made restrictions worse in other countries like Australia.

It’s clear that these activities aren’t random, isolated incidents of internet pranksters but rather multiple groups of people willing to create more unnecessary suffering and destabilise economic growth. This style of mass disinformation is very similar to the tactics employed by military intelligence services during the Cold War and in other places and now various groups on the internet has learned to inflict the same level of damage to nations by means of deception and exploiting uneducated citizens for their own agendas.

What’s more tragic is that the major social media platforms has consistently failed to combat the problem, and they even allow them to exist to spread their lies until they decide to remove them. Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok and new right wing social media platforms are the grounds where disinformation campaigns are born and where they spread to society at large.

Now the question is: How do we stop this in the Bahamas?

The answer is that we’re out of options to negotiate for these organisations to stop spreading these lies, and it is the time for action against the social media platforms who gave them the ability to run free.

The Bahamas has allowed itself to be on the losing end of negotiations for decades, but it isn’t too late to stop disinformation from reaching the Bahamas. The government must give an ultimatum for the owners to either set up a national firewall to remove political groups from being accessed in the Bahamas or if these conditions aren’t met within a year, all social media platforms will be forever banned from this country until further notice.

People may think these measures are draconian, but the level of damage inflicted on the pandemic recovery efforts is too high to risk these groups to spread propaganda in the Bahamas, which will make our restrictions and lockdowns worse. The Western world has already allowed itself to be deceived by military disinformation campaigns by rogue groups and social media should have never allowed themselves to be used as political pawns, but we must be the ones to change this tide and show them that we’re better than this.

AMMAKA RUSSELL

Nassau,

August 31, 2021.