The World Economic Forum isn’t planning a global takeover (2024)

Social media users are again sounding the alarm about "the Great Reset," which they say is a plan by global elites to seize control of everything.

A Sept. 27 Instagram post describes the World Economic Forum’s "plan to control us." It says one of the forum’s "predictions is that by 2030: ‘You will own nothing & be happy.’"

"‘But why would the elites want a world like this?’" the post asks.

"Simple. If you own nothing, they own everything," it says. "They can take anything away from you when they want. And we won’t have freedom."

The post claims "the Great Reset is coming" and urges people to "protect" themselves.

Multiple posts making this claim have been shared recently on Instagram. These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

(Screengrabs from Instagram)

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The World Economic Forum and "the Great Reset" have long been at the center of conspiracy theories. The forum is a prominent international nongovernmental organization that engages political, cultural and business leaders in building regional and global agendas. But the forum has never advocated for a global takeover, and there’s no evidence it wants to abolish private ownership of goods and property.

This claim that the World Economic Forum wants to take control of people’s possessions likely originates from a 2016 Facebook video, which listed eight predictions for the world in 2030. The first one said, "You will own nothing and be happy. Whatever you want you’ll rent and it’ll be delivered by drone."

Danish politician Ida Auken wrote this prediction in 2016. The corresponding article has since been removed from the World Economic Forum’s website, but in an archived version, Auken explains that this is not her "utopia or dream of the future." The author’s note also says that she "wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development."

A few years later, at the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, the World Economic Forum proposed a set of policy ideas it referred to as "the Great Reset." But it has since been hijacked by conspiracy theorists.

The theory’s believers saw the World Economic Forum’s proposal as proof that "global elites want to use the coronavirus as a tool to reorganize global societies and economies to their benefit at the expense of ordinary people, with the ultimate goal of a global totalitarian regime," according to the Anti-Defamation League. However, this conspiracy theory has been widely debunked.

We rate the claim that World Economic Forum "elites" are pushing the Great Reset, which aims to control people by taking all their possessions, False.

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