Does the World Economic Forum Want to Legalize Pedophilia?
Claims are circulating online that the World Economic Forum has called for the decriminalization of pedophilia. These claims are false.
The claims appear to originate from an article published on News Punch on January 3 and from a corresponding video on the Rumble channel “The People’s Voice.” News Punch and “The People’s Voice” are a joint enterprise, as evidenced by the contact information provided on the Facebook page of the latter. The Dispatch has previously debunked erroneous claims by both.
The social media posts circulating the false claim tend to cite either the News Punch article or the Rumble video as their source (or “sauce” as the tweet above misspells it.) One Facebook post shares the claim with an accompanying screenshot of an authentic New York Times op-ed headline from 2014 headlined “Pedophilia: A Disorder, Not a Crime.” The caption of the post reads “The link to the source is in the first comment,” which in turn directs readers to the Rumble video. Another post also cites The People’s Voice as its source.
The claim, as the News Punch article puts it, is that “The World Economic Forum is now calling for the decriminalization of sex with children, arguing that laws against ‘age gap love,’ more commonly known as pedophilia, ‘violate human rights.’” Allegedly, “a research paper presented at the WEF in Davos” exists aiming to convince its readership that the decriminalization of pedophilia will help to slow global population growth and thus save the climate.
No such “research paper” exists, nor has anyone represented at the World Economic Forum made the claims attributed to the body by either of these organs of misinformation.
A search of the World Economic Forum’s published papers and reports on its website reveals the only mention of pedophilia in its archive to be in a single article lamenting the proliferation of fake news sites online. A similar search of the specific term “age gap love,” alleged by the News Punch article to appear in an official WEF “research paper,” also reveals no evidence of the claims in question. Nor do advanced Twitter searches of the WEF’s account yield any evidence of either of these terms being employed to the effect alleged by the fake news sites. The claims have been fabricated out of whole cloth.
The World Economic Forum did not respond when asked for comment.
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