During today’s press conference from the “World Health Organisation” (WHO), Dr. Ghebreyesus (WHO Director-General) gave a very clear and most-appreciated message:
“In the past year, several governments including Australia, Canada, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Spain and the United Kingdom have all introduced measures to protect children from online harm.
Together, these measures reflect a growing global consensus that digital environments require effective governance, accountability, age-appropriate design, and stronger safeguards to protect child health.
Digital environments are not neutral. How they are designed, governed, and monetized shapes many aspects of our lives, including health.”
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (WHO Director-General)
We best understand that so called “social media” mostly pushes “trash culture” and “mimetic forces” (like greed, vanity, envy, jealousy, group-think) and this has a devastating impact on high-quality journalistic work (e.g., “investigative journalism“) – the most important “4th column” of vivid democracies.
“Free speech” – the way how highly commercialised “social media” corporations interpret it – is just another word for “anarchy” and the power of strength rather than cultivated societies based on democratically legitimised and strongly institutionalised legal frameworks . “Trash culture” is a very flat society, based on quantities rather than quality. “Free speech” and the concept of “freedom” is better replaced by the concept of “health” (cf. e.g., Baumann, K.: “The philosophy of a healthy and thus sustainable (global) society“, 2026).
The WHO certainly can lead the way towards “healthy social media”, “healthy artificial intelligence” (AI), and also “healthy sexuality”. I see good progress in developing a healthy governance for “social media”. With “artificial intelligence” (AI), attention is rising towards healthy governance (cf. e.g., United Nations: “Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI“, 2026).
Regarding sexuality and “pornography“, Emmanuel Macron – in his role as “President of France” – was brave enough to bring the topic into the public sphere lately. But the understanding of e.g., “porn addiction” is jeopardised by societal prudishness, shame, prejudice, stereotypes, and fear. The number of unreported cases seems to be significant and epidemic.
The “World Wide Web” (WWW) can be seen as the best social research project ever. We have good evidence that websites with purely pornographic content rank at least within the top 10 of global websites. The impact from the combination of “free speech” in the sense of “anarchy” and “trash culture” in the form of “pornography” is most destructive for a healthy and thus sustainable society based on values like creativity, responsibility, consciousness, patience, and discipline.
The “health” (including joy, well-being, happiness) of a person is first of all related to strong, vivid, real, and physical social relations, based on honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability – the main ingredients for “love“.
The WHO understands that and can – based on this understanding and approach – lead the way towards a healthy global governance for new technologies. But the global democratic processes and the global institutional framework to actually execute such a healthy global governance for e.g., “social media”, “AI”, and “pornography” is not there yet and shows in my view another convincing argument for the development of global democracy supported by strong global institutions based on the concept of a “Global Democratic Republic“.
picture shows painting by Raffael: Study for “Disputa”, ca. 1508 – 1509;
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
