Wikipedia: From Democratized Knowledge to Left-Establishment Propaganda

by Glenn Greenwald | Jul 31, 2023

Wikipedia has long been one of the internet’s most influential sites but the online encyclopedia’s power has grown significantly in the last several years as the result of a growing relationship with Google that, among other things, ensures that it is automatically the most prominent site whenever one uses the Google search engine to search a particular person, institution, or other entity.

As usually happens with new information tools that grow in power and influence, establishment forces began to prioritize the weaponization of Wikipedia for their own purposes. That is one of the reasons Google began to fund and otherwise support it: as a means of commandeering it. And all sorts of instruments have been developed to degrade what was once one of the most promising sites on the internet into yet another weapon of propaganda for the liberal establishment.

So extreme has this degradation been that one of Wikipedia’s two co-founders – Larry Sanger – the person who coined the name Wikipedia and wrote its original governing documents and philosophy, more than 20 years ago, warned the world in the last several years that the site is no longer trustworthy as a source of information because it has now become little more than a propaganda arm of the liberal establishment, where every article involving political controversies or political figures is blatantly slanted in favor of establishment liberalism

We’ll dissect and explain exactly how this manipulation and gaming of Wikipedia is achieved.

And we’ll also speak with Sanger himself on what the mission of this site was supposed to be – an ideology-free online encyclopedia made more reliable than ever by the fact that it was to be both neutral and dependent upon collective human knowledge – and how specifically and deliberately those defining values are now being violated.

We did have Larry Sanger confirmed for several days and we’re hoping he will still appear. We had difficulty speaking with him over the last several hours to do the last confirmation, but we’re hoping he simply is offline and at the right moment will appear. But we will let you know. We nonetheless have the reporting entirely prepared to walk you through how Wikipedia is being weaponized and instrumentalized in favor of liberal propaganda.

Then, Joe Rogan hosted the comedian Jim Gaffigan on his Friday night show and tried to explain to that comedian the reasons why it’s clear that the U.S. security state, especially the FBI, had at least some involvement in the events of January 6. In response, Gaffigan simply could not fathom that the FBI could be capable of such nefarious actions, nor did he conceive of any possible reason why they might be motivated to do these sorts of things. We’re going to break down that discussion to highlight all of the evidence proving the truth of Rogan’s belief and add some other reasons, some motives why the FBI clearly would be motivated to engage in exactly that kind of behavior, namely, turn what was intended to be a peaceful protest into a violent one and turn a protest movement into an insurrectionary movement in the United States. We’ll also demonstrate how this sort of naiveté about – and even support for – the U.S. security state is now central to the banal liberal worldview, or at least the anti-Trump worldview demonstrated or highlighted by Gaffigan.

As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow the show on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. The episodes appear there 12 hours after the first broadcast, live, here on Rumble, and you can rate and review the shows which help spread the visibility of the program.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.

There is little question that Wikipedia is one of the most influential – one of the most consequential – sites on all the Internet. It’s been that way for quite some time but as a result of its growing relationship with Google, it has become far more consequential than ever at any point in its 23-year history. As The Verge reported in June of last year, “Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation for better access to information becoming one of the first Wikimedia Enterprise customers.” And the article reports:

Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation to help serve up the most accurate and up-to-date information on its search engine. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, says Google is one of the first companies to buy into its commercial Enterprise service.

 

Although you may not notice it, Google uses Wikimedia’s services in a number of ways. The most obvious is within its “knowledge panels,” which appear on the side of search results pages when you look up the people, places, or things within Google’s massive database. Wikipedia is one of the sources Google frequently uses to populate the information inside these panels. Google also cites Wikipedia in the information panels it adds to some YouTube videos to fight misinformation and conspiracy theories (although it didn’t really inform Wikimedia of its plans to do so ahead of time). (The Verge. June 22, 2022)

Suffice it to say, if you search for any political figure or any political entity or any political controversy, Wikipedia is far and away the most dominant influence on what will appear at the very top, in the most prominent real estate, on the search engine of the Internet’s most powerful company, which is Google. Here is just one of the countless examples.

We randomly chose John Brennan, the former CIA director under President Obama, where if you search “John Brennan,” immediately, it will pop up several photos that are from his Wikipedia site. Much of the information that is populated within the Wikipedia page, all comes from Wikipedia. The very first site to appear is – still struggling and fighting with these pens because it’s a new feature that we have and, for some reason, I’m not very adept at it but there we go:

The very first entry that comes up is the Wikipedia site itself and then here as well, in the right corner, you see automatically information about him, and it’s basically nothing more than the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s page and then a link to Wikipedia itself. So, everything about Google is designed to push you toward Wikipedia, to show you that Wikipedia is the most reliable source of information, and by doing so, it has made that site one of the most consequential ones. Even though it was the case for a long time that people were somewhat skeptical about Wikipedia in the sense that people understood that you just don’t cite Wikipedia in a journalistic article or an academic paper. Nonetheless, Google’s constant featuring of it, its centering on Wikipedia, makes it so that, implicitly, we understand that if we search on Google, we’re going to be relying on Wikipedia in order to shape our preliminary understanding of whatever topic it is that we’re attempting to learn more about and, as a result, that constantly reinforces by design the notion that Wikipedia is the starting point, if not the ending point for what we need to read to understand at least the basics about whatever topic in which we’re interested. That in turn has made Wikipedia more powerful and more consequential than ever.

We know what happens whenever there’s some instrument or some platform that becomes extremely influential in terms of the flow of information in the United States or the West, which is that establishment forces work very hard to try to commandeer it and exploit it to a propaganda arm for their side. That was what was done to the Internet generally. If you go back and read the triumphalist literature about the Internet at its advent in the mid-1990s, it was heralded as this extraordinary liberatory technology, precisely because it was going to enable human beings to communicate with one another and let us organize amongst ourselves and express political activism and political debate without having to rely upon the same corporate and state authorities the centralized power that governs the rest of our lives. That’s what made the Internet so powerful. And yet, as a result of that, precisely for that reason, it couldn’t be left alone. It couldn’t be allowed to remain a free entity because that was too threatening to establishment forces to have this instrument worldwide that allowed the flow of information to take place without them being able to control it.

So, they’ve worked over many years to arrive at the point that we’re now at where the vast bulk of the Internet is essentially controlled by a small number of mega-corporations called Big Tech that are, according to the official position of the Commerce Committee in Congress, classic monopolies, under the Antitrust Law and yet, they’re way too powerful to ever permit a coalition to break them up or to prevent further integration. They just buy up every site. When the communications app WhatsApp started to become very popular, especially in developing countries in the democratic world, Facebook just went and bought it like they did with Instagram. So now, whatever censorship takes place at the highest levels of Facebook – on Friday night, we showed you that one of the key officials controlling how censorship is effectuated at Facebook was somebody who had spent previously his entire adult life at the CIA and there are all kinds of U.S. security state agents embedded throughout Facebook – Facebook now controls not just Facebook itself, which is already gigantic enough, but also Instagram and WhatsApp by having purchased it. Google has done the same thing with platforms like YouTube. And so, you have the Internet controlled by a small number of corporate giants and megagiants, and then, at the same time, the U.S. government, as we know – as we cover frequently on this show because of how important it is – has now developed a system to control how those megacorporations make decisions about what information is and is not permitted to flow through the Internet.

That is the Internet as a macrocosm – or what has happened to the Internet. Wikipedia is the microcosm view of that, which is that it has become an extremely powerful platform by design. Google has largely made it that and then, having recognized that power establishment force, seized it, so that, essentially, the same thing that you read in The New York Times, that you read on CNN or that is or is not permitted to be said on Google and Facebook, is exactly the message that is reinforced by Wikipedia over and over and over again. It’s important, I think, to understand how it functions and the implications of it.

There have been a lot of studies that have been done for many years showing how easily gamed and manipulated Wikipedia has become and how concerted of an effort it is that has been put into place to ensure that its content is controlled by a small number of people whose ideology aligns with the liberal establishment. So here from the journal Perficient, in September 2015, you see the headline “Google Still Loves Wikipedia (More Than Its Own Properties).” This is all about how Google is obsessed with turning Wikipedia into one of the Internet’s most influential sites. So, we can read that study:

Of all the URLs we looked at, nearly 7% of them were from Wikipedia (sometimes more than once per SERP). Looking at it another way, Wikipedia shows up in the top 10 of search results more than 50% of the time. In fact, it seemed to show up in commercial queries (7.33% of all URLs) more often than it did for the informational queries (6.29% in the Perficient Digital data from the week of August 24th).

 

The bulk of the Wikipedia traffic loss appears to be driven by rankings drops, as Wikipedia’s overall representation in the SERPs changes only slightly, but the site did lose many of its #1 and #2 ranking positions.

 

This prevalence of Wikipedia exceeds the level at which Google shows its own properties, especially in commercial queries where Google properties represent only about 2.3% of the URLs we examined. (Perficient, Sept. 23, 2015)

So going all the way back to 2015, there was a concerted effort in place by Google to ensure that Wikipedia occupied more influential real estate than even Google’s own properties such as YouTube or other Google platforms. And we just showed you that page, the randomly selected one from John Brennan, where almost the entire first page of the search, the entire top of the page is shaped and defined by Wikipedia. Everything about it is designed to either send you to Wikipedia or declare that the information on Wikipedia is authoritative information about whatever person or entity you are searching for. That makes it an incredibly valuable weapon. Obviously, no weapon that is valuable is going to be left alone by the establishment because they will not allow any valuable instrument to ever be out of control or out of their hands. That is the fight over the flow of information on the Internet: whether the Internet will enable free commentary and free dissemination of information, or whether it will be increasingly controlled by a small number of centralized state and corporate authorities. That, to me, is the overarching war about what the Internet will become because if the Internet becomes this kind of totalitarian or despotic platform where dissent is increasingly suppressed, where the information that’s allowed to be read and heard is controlled by the U.S. security state, by the U.S. government, and by this tiny number of mega-corporations that it controls, our society will be similarly totalitarian or similarly despotic because who controls the flow of information is who wields power in this society? That is why we spend so much time focused on these questions. Wikipedia does not get nearly enough attention in terms of the vital role that it is playing and it got powerful, not organically, but because Google took it and made it so to the point where they’re promoting it even more aggressively than they promote their own platforms, that’s how much they understand that Wikipedia, by turning it into such a powerful entity and then controlling it, can be the most valuable propaganda arm of any other weapon.

As it turns out, there are two co-founders of Wikipedia, one is Larry Sanger, whom, again, we hope to have on our show tonight. He has been warning for many years about how biased Wikipedia has become to the point of being totally unreliable. He has been telling the public nobody should trust Wikipedia because it’s, now, nothing more than a propaganda arm for American liberalism or Western liberalism. Here in the British newspaper, The Independent, in July 2021, the headline reads: “Nobody Should Trust Wikipedia, Says Man Who Invented Wikipedia. He says there’s a complex game being played to make an article say what somebody wants it to say.” Here’s what the article reported.

Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can’t always be trusted to give people the truth. (The Independent. July 16, 2021)<

That’s a huge understatement for what he’s actually saying. He’s not just saying the website can’t always be trusted. He’s saying it can never be trusted because it’s become unreliable.

He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”

 

Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” said Mr. Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.

 

He told Lockdown TV that “if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”

 

The Wikipedia founder also said there are companies that hire paid writers and editors to go in and change articles.

 

Mr. Sanger cited the example of an article about US President Joe Biden and says it doesn’t include information from the Republicans’ perspective. (The Independent. July 16, 2021)

In other words, it’s perfectly aligned with how the corporate media functions. One of the things I’ve been noticing recently is – and there are other people who have noticed this before I did – if there is a scandal or some other incriminating episode involving the Biden administration or Joe Biden in particular, the initial instinct of the corporate media is to ignore it and suppress it and just not talk about it to maintain this closed information system. We showed you on Thursday night when we covered the new release of these Facebook emails – the Facebook Files, as the House Judiciary Committee called it – detailing how the U.S. government has been badgering and hectoring and coercing Facebook to censor during the COVID pandemic for it – how Oliver Darcy at CNN boasted of the fact that most media outlets just simply chose to ignore the entire story. They just didn’t let their viewers know about it. We already walked you through how major stories and major parts of major stories are simply unknown to liberals because the media outlets that they are trained and conditioned to trust will just simply not discuss them at all. Occasionally, when they’re forced to discuss it because it’s becoming too much, it will always be framed as “Republicans seek to exploit Hunter Biden’s legal troubles” or “Donald Trump’s campaign once again attacks the Biden Justice Department.” It’s always framed as not the story itself, not the fact that Hunter Biden’s plea agreement collapsed the minute it was subjected to the slightest judicial scrutiny – because it was so unprecedented in terms of how it was structured and so unduly generous to Hunter Biden that the judge took one look at it and said, “Are you kidding?”, and when she started questioning the two sides about it, the Justice Department became embarrassed about they offered Hunter Biden and they denied the scope was as broad as it was. The entire deal fell apart because Biden’s lawyer said, well, we were promised that it really was this broad, as Your Honor is asking. Something like that just can’t be hidden but instead of reporting on that, they’ll say “Republicans once again look to use Hunter Biden against Joe Biden.” That’s how they frame it. And there’s never the conservative perspective included, except to mock it.

That’s exactly what Larry Sanger is saying is true of Wikipedia. I can assure you that all you have to do is go and look at a controversial person for a controversial event. Just go read it. It will completely comport with the Democratic Party worldview or the worldview of MSNBC. Every article about a prominent person aligns with exactly what the liberal worldview is in a way that is much more blatant than it ever was before, ever since Google started pumping it up. Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia goes on:

“The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him. So, if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you’re not going to get it from the article,” he said.

 

He argued that there should be at least a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal but there is very little of that. (The Independent. July 16, 2021)

The Ukraine scandal being that Hunter Biden, his son, was being paid $80,000 a month to sit on the board of an energy company in Ukraine, at the same time that Joe Biden, the vice president, was charged with running Ukraine. He goes on:

“Maybe there’s some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid, are not identified by name — they actually are supposed to be identified by name and say ‘we represent this firm’ if they are officially registered with some sort of Wikipedia editing firm,” he said.

 

“But they don’t have to do that because there is no requirement for real names. As I say it is a very complex sort of game … there are all sorts of tricks that people can play to win it,” he added. (The Independent. July 16, 2021)

 So, part of it is just the fact that Wikipedia is now replete with editors who are Democrats and have a liberal ideology. So, part of it is just true believers who have overrun the site and who are their dominant editors. And then part of it is that the liberal establishment has figured out how to game the site.

Before we show you some of the details, we obviously can’t dissect every single technique that is used to manipulate and game with Wikipedia, but we do want to delve into this specific set of how some of them take place. The most important ones take place because they are actually representative of the broader tactics of how the establishment in the United States is controlling the flow of information, including things like inventing the disinformation industry, the industry full of people with fake credentials to declare themselves “disinformation experts” who report to decree what is true and false in order to get what they declare to be false censored off the Internet on the grounds that nobody needs false information.

But before we delve into the specific tactics, we want to just show you a couple of examples on both sides – people who are enemies of the establishment and people who are aligned with the establishment – to see how blatantly disparate their treatment is. So, there is a page devoted to the scandal of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The title of this article on the scandal is “Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory” – remember, this is supposed to be an ideology-free, neutral encyclopedia. There is a mountain of evidence showing that Hunter Biden was paid $80,000 a month by Burisma executives because they were stupid, but because they were smart. Of course, they were getting something in value for the $80,000 a month. They were getting a lot in value in the way of access to Joe Biden and he took all sorts of steps to benefit Burisma or give Burisma the impression that they were having access to the most important official in Ukraine, who happened to be Joe Biden. And yet, according to this encyclopedia article, this evidence doesn’t exist. This is just a complete “conspiracy” theory. So, the very first paragraph of this encyclopedia entry on the Biden-Ukraine “conspiracy theory” reads as follows:

The Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, engaged in corrupt activities relating to his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign […] (Wikipedia)

So go back there. Notice the Biden-Ukraine scandal is, according to Wikipedia, the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory but the Trump controversy involving Ukraine is the Trump-Ukraine scandal. Everything is written to completely comport with the liberal worldview of the Democratic Party talking points. And it’s amazing. This is one of the most important controversies in our politics and this is written exactly the way that if you gave the keys to Wikipedia, to the DNC, they would write. It would read no different. “As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment. These falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and damage his chances during the 2020 presidential campaign.”

The conspiracy theory alleges that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son.

 

United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.” (Wikipedia.)

Can it be more blatant than that? Not only is it a false conspiracy theory but it’s one that the Russians were behind and was done to victimize poor President Biden and to sabotage his election chances. Just even the tone doesn’t bother to pretend. This is the site that is being heavily financed and promoted by Google as the authoritative source of what is true or not about the world and it reads like it’s a monologue from The Rachel Maddow Show. Every page does.

Here is an article on the ongoing controversy over the origin of COVID. It is entitled “The COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory” and here’s what this encyclopedia has to say about the hypothesis that the COVID virus emerged not as the result of natural occurrences in the animal world that had a zoonotic origin and leaped to human species, but instead appeared in Wuhan because it leaked from the lab in Wuhan that was doing exactly the kind of research on bat viruses, coronaviruses, that made them more contagious to humans. This is Wikipedia:

The COVID-19 lab leak theory, or lab leak hypothesis, is the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, is the result of a laboratory leak. The theory is highly controversial; most scientists believe the virus spilled into human populations through natural zoonosis, similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history. Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats, and spread to humans from infected wild animals, functioning as an intermediate host, at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019. Several candidate animal species have been identified as potential intermediate hosts. There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 existed in any laboratory prior to the pandemic.

 

The idea that the virus was released from a laboratory (accidentally or deliberately) appeared early in the pandemic. It gained popularity in the United States through promotion by conservative personalities in early 2020, fomenting tensions between the U.S. and China. Scientists and media outlets widely dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. (Wikipedia)

Let me tell you a fact. An absolute, indisputable fact. The view of the leading scientists in the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as the FBI is that the most likely explanation for how the COVID pandemic emerged is through the research that was funded by the United States to be conducted in the Wuhan lab. You would have no idea that that was true from this Wikipedia entry, on one of the most important questions of at least the last decade, which is where the COVID pandemic came from. Every word is designed to suggest that only right-wing conspiracy theorists and liars would invest any plausibility in the possibility that it came from a leak and not from where the virus came from – a leak and not from a naturally occurring event. Even though, we know for certain that the top virologists and epidemiologists in the world writing to Dr. Fauci, at the start of the pandemic, were adamant that the evidence made it almost impossible to believe that it was naturally occurring and that the evidence was overwhelming, instead, it was consistent with manipulation in the lab. And there’s an entire scandal about whether the scientists then deliberately signed a letter they themselves didn’t believe, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, who was desperate to ensure that programs that he funded and scientists, in general, weren’t blamed for the pandemic but instead, we believe the theory that the Chinese have such filthy and primitive and unsanitary eating practices that it came from their wet markets.

I’m not going to suggest that there’s definitive proof one way or the other. Having looked at all the evidence – and we’ve done many shows on this – I concur with the lead scientists of the Department of Energy that the evidence is far more convincing that it came from a lab rather than naturally occurring. I wouldn’t mind at all if the Wikipedia page reflected that debate, that uncertainty, but it doesn’t. It sneers at the notion that it could have come from the Wuhan lab and insinuates that it’s only right-wing liars trying to create a war with China – who would possibly believe that? – and that it’s been dismissed as a conspiracy theory. It’s exactly like if you asked an MSNBC personality to comment on. If you ask Joy Reid to comment on the COVID pandemic, that’s exactly what she would tell you, word for word, exactly what was in this entry – and that’s true of almost every entry. It shocked me – when I began looking at this over the last six months to a year – how blatant it has become.

Let me show you what happens if you are an enemy of the liberal establishment. Let’s take a look at one of the prime enemies of the liberal establishment right now: he’s running in the Democratic primary against Joe Biden and he’s questioning the war in Ukraine and the censorship regime and, of course, COVID orthodoxy. It is pretty much the triple derby of things that are most important for the establishment, and he is a dissident on. And he has been polling too high for their comfort. He bears the Kennedy name, he has access to a lot of money and, therefore, he’s one of the leading enemies of the liberal establishment. So, if you wanted to find out about RFK, Jr. by going to Google, you would immediately be directed to his Wikipedia page and here’s what you would immediately read.

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials RFK, Jr., is an American environmental lawyer, politician and writer.

So, they made it through one sentence without didactic and polemical slanting. But then this is what they say in the next sentence.

He is known for promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, and public health-related conspiracy theories. He is a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

 

Since 2005, he has promoted the scientifically discredited claim of a link between vaccines and autism and is founder and chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy has emerged as a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in the United States. (Wikipedia)

That’s in the first paragraph. He’s a purveyor of disinformation. He’s known as a liar. He’s a conspiracy theorist. That is the site that Google has purposely convinced Americans to believe is authoritative and to which they direct them.

If you take a look at somebody who is a proven conspiracy theorist, but who is an ally of the liberal establishment, such as David Frum, who is one of the most dishonest purveyors of disinformation in the country. He was George Bush’s speechwriter following 9/11 and disseminated all kinds of falsehoods, the ultimate conspiracy theory of our generation – the most destructive one – that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That they were on an axis of evil with Iran and North Korea, even though they were dedicated enemies of Iran, that they were in alliance with Osama bin Laden, suggesting that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attack, that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks. We covered that on a show recently. David Frum is an actual conspiracy theorist. His conspiracy theories and lies have resulted in the death of at least a million people. You would expect, right, that if Wikipedia is willing to take a strong stance, as they do with RFK, Jr., and call a conspiracy theorist and a liar in the first paragraph, of all people, you would expect to find that in David Frum’s Wikipedia page. And yet, the term conspiracy theory does not appear on David Frum’s Wikipedia page because David Frum is an ally of the liberal establishment and one of the most vocal opponents of Donald Trump. It just doesn’t appear, except for one sentence that mentions that David Frum opposed conspiracy theories being spread about President Obama. So, the only mention of conspiracy theories in David Frum’s entire lengthy Wikipedia page is to mention or cast or depict him as an opponent of them.

So here you see the beginning part of his Wikipedia page. Imagine the impression, the difference in the impression that these deliberately create as opposed to the RFK, Jr.’s one.

David Jeffrey Frum (/frʌm/; born June 1960) is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush’s presidency written by a former member of the administration.[4] He has taken credit for the famous phrase “axis of evil” in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address.[5][6]

Notice not a critique about that phrase, it depicts this historically neutral figure neutrally describing what he did in his career.

In 2009, Frum denounced various anti-Obama conspiracy theories as “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps”.

Frum supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He helped write George W. Bush‘s famous “Axis of Evil” speech to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.[53] Frum is a supporter of Israel.[55][56] He opposed President Barack Obama‘s Iran nuclear deal.[53]

Let’s take a look at one more example. Jeffrey Goldberg, who is the current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, probably did more than any single American to convince Americans of the outright lie, the classic conspiracy theory, that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Osama bin Laden when he was a reporter at The New Yorker. That was a vital lie to convince Americans because, after 9/11, Americans were willing to support a war if they were convinced they were going to war against the people who perpetrated this horrific attack on American soil. Even if they had convinced Americans Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, which David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg both attempted to do, that would be insufficient to generate the support necessary without misleading Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein had an alliance with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. It was Jeffrey Goldberg who took the lead in spreading that lie, that disinformation, that conspiracy theory. And if you look at his Wikipedia page, there is a mention that that theory has been debunked because it quotes my saying so, but it’s way buried down in the Wikipedia page. I mean, if you’re not willing to spend 20 minutes reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s Wikipedia page and just want to find out quickly who he is, and you read the first section, you would think he’s a journalist of great stature. There’s no hint of criticism of him in the first passage of his Wikipedia page. Let alone the heaping of invective the way you find with RFK, Jr. or other enemies of the liberal establishment.

Jeffrey Mark Goldberg (born September 22, 1965) is an American journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. During his nine years at The Atlantic prior to becoming editor, Goldberg became known for his coverage of foreign affairs.

 

Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, called Goldberg “the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel,”[16] and David Rothkopf, the former editor and CEO of the FP Group, called him “one of the most incisive, respected foreign policy journalists around.”[17] He has been described by critics as a liberal,[18] a Zionist[19] and a critic of Israel.[20] The New York Times reported that he “shaped” The Atlantic’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, only the third endorsement in the magazine’s 160-year history. (Wikipedia)

You have to go very far down Goldberg’s Wikipedia page, I mean, near the bottom to find one of the only criticisms of him.

In 2002, Goldberg’s “The Great Terror” published in The New Yorker argued that the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein was significant, discussing the possible connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The Saddam–al-Qaida conspiracy theory has since been debunked. It also discussed the Iraqi nuclear program, averring that there was “some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon … There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons.

 

Glenn Greenwald called Goldberg “one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq”, saying Goldberg had “compiled a record of humiliating falsehood-dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller’s both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact”. In his 2008 article in Slate titled “How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?”, Goldberg explained why he initially supported the Iraq War and wrote that he “didn’t realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be”. (Wikipedia)

I mean, in comparison to what Jeffrey Goldberg said and did, I mean, here’s just one article, that won magazine awards at the time. From March 2002, so shortly after the 9/11 attack, when his friend David Frum was having George Bush accuse Iraq of being behind the anthrax attack and being in league with al-Qaida and an alliance with Iran and North Korea, here you see Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, arguably the most influential journal for American liberals and obviously the support of American liberals were vital to get that word started — so that Democratic senators like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, could support it – and they succeeded in doing that, at the time of the Iraq war, and six months later, 70% of Americans – 70% – believed the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, and it was Jeffrey Goldberg who did more than any other journalist to ensure that they did.

Here, in March 2002, in his now notorious article, “The Great Terror: in Northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal war on the Kurds –  and of his possible ties to al-Qaida.“

David Frum doesn’t have, even at the end of the article the way Goldberg does, any mention that he ever spread disinformation, even though throughout our case entry and the entry on the lab leak theory and the scandal involving Joe Biden and Ukraine, it instantly denounces it as a debunked conspiracy theory full of lies. David Frum has no criticisms in his because he is an ally of the establishment, not an enemy of it. And yet. Kurtz Is what a little bit of the speech that he boasted of having written the words that he put into George W Bush’s mouth full of conspiracy theories and lies that led to infinitely more deaths and infinitely more destruction than anything you could accuse RFK, Jr. of having done.

Video. George W. Bush State of the Union. January 2002)

 

G. W. Bush: Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children.

George W. Bush as well, if you looked at his entry, has some criticisms in it, but nowhere near anything of the kind that enemies of the American establishment do or the way that they have all but decreed crucial scandals involving Joe Biden to be absolute lies.

Let me tell you one more example before we talk to Larry. This is the new site, The Grayzone, which is devoted to critiquing the U.S. security state and America’s wars. It does a lot of reporting that is controversial for sure but oftentimes they are the ones opposing the lies and conspiracy theories spread by the establishment – people like David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg. Just take a look at what has been done to this page. Tell me if this sounds anything like an encyclopedia as opposed to a Democratic National Committee propaganda arm.

The Grayzone is an American far-left news website and blog founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal. The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project, was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.  A fringe website, it is known for misleading reporting and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes. The Grayzone has denied human rights abuses against Uyghurs, posted conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, and posted pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

Grayzone writers such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia. (Wikipedia)

This is all the first paragraph.

The Grayzone’s news content is generally considered to be fringe and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line, centered around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world. (Wikipedia)

Needless to say, opposing U.S. foreign policy and desiring a multipolar world does not make you a pro-Kremlin editorial site. All of this is propaganda, deeply, ideological propaganda against a news outlet that is a harsh critic of establishment foreign policy.

The website has supported the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, publishing content denying that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians during the Syrian civil war and accused the OPCW of a “cover-up. “The website has also denied the scope of the Xinjiang internment camps and alleged Uyghur genocide, downplaying widely reported abuses by the Chinese government against Turkish Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets and organizations, stated that Grayzone reporter Aaron Maté was the “most prolific spreader of disinformation” on matters concerning Syria amongst its study group, overtaking Vanessa Beeley.

This is anything but an encyclopedia and that is the reason why our guest tonight – I’m really thrilled that we have him and we’re about to talk to him – is Larry Sanger, who is one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia. He coined its name. He wrote a lot of the governing policies that defined the mission of Wikipedia and what its values were supposed to be. He has become one of its most prominent and obviously knowledgeable critics because it has become an unreliable propaganda site in favor of one of the two political parties and the liberal ideology. We were excited to talk to him because he obviously understands the site as well as anybody and has been incredibly honest about denouncing what was, along with Jimmy Wales, his creation. So, we’re delighted to welcome Larry to our show.

The Interview: Larry Sanger

G. Greenwald: Good evening. It’s great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Larry Sanger: Yeah, Glenn, it’s so good to meet you finally and come on the program.

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. We’re thrilled to have you. So let me begin kind of at the start of Wikipedia. Obviously, 23 years or so is a long time. 25 years, a long time. A lot of people have trouble remembering sometimes the year prior. I know sometimes I do. So, let’s put this into historical context and talk about, since you were there, how Wikipedia was created and what the intent of this site was supposed to be.

Larry Sanger:  Well, I arrived in California with the assignment to basically start a free encyclopedia for Bomis.com, which was the website, the company, that Jimmy Wales was the CEO of. And initially, it was going to be called Newpedia and we worked on it a very carefully, you know, academically edited encyclopedia for the first year and it was going very slowly. And so, I cast around for different ideas about how to speed up the pace of production, essentially, and well, a friend of mine told me about “wikis” and I thought that it would be potentially a good idea if wikis actually worked the way that he said that they did. And to create a wiki encyclopedia where anyone could go to any page on the site, you can start new pages and just edit other people’s work really without any controls, other than other people editing their work. Essentially that’s how a wiki works, but at least that’s how it worked in the beginning. Now there are a lot more controls, but in the beginning, the aim was to create a really big open source. Well, the word is actually open content, so it’s like open-source software, but it’s open content, so it’s free. Anyone can use it, anyone can sort it just like open-source software and something that would be a free resource to basically help enlighten the world, essentially, or at least give, maybe that’s a little bit too strong, give some knowledge to the world, especially people who can’t afford it. What we thought at the time was that the paragon of an encyclopedia was a set of encyclopedias on a bookshelf, or at least something that would, you know, cost a lot of money. So that was the idea. And initially, it was supposed to be neutral. That was like one of the most important features of a credible encyclopedia, to my mind at least, was that you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an article was written by a Democrat or a Republican. Generally speaking, you should present the information that a person would need in order to make up his own mind about issues of controversy, of any sort of controversy. But unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

G. Greenwald: So, obviously, there has been this concern that Wikipedia, because it’s created without a lot of controls and because it is something that anyone can contribute to, even people without credentials, as part of establishment circles understand that term, that it could be replete with errors and mistakes and the like. But this idea of it being ideology-free or nonpartisan or not connected to any particular faction seemed to be, at least to me, something that was, at least, as an aspiration maintained in the beginning part of the site. And your criticisms of the site began pretty early, I think as early as 2004, 2005, 2006. Talk about kind of the process of that. Like when did you first start detecting that something had gone awry and what was it that you were getting concerned by?

Larry Sanger: I wasn’t really so much concerned about the neutrality problem in 2004 and 2005, because you’re right, the first four or five years of the website, it was… it was pretty unusual. You know, you could actually… it would be the only place online where you could find an article that was really meaty and, in some cases, at least that actually tried to explain both sides of issues. And it was pretty unusual in that way. The problem that I saw with the project at that time was, ironically enough, that there was not enough respect for expertise. The community had sort of closed itself off from the – I don’t want to say the prerogatives, that is the wrong word, but they just didn’t have any respect when an expert on any subject really would show up. And if there were already people there who had like poll within the community that had their own axe to grind, it wouldn’t matter what sort of, you know, training, what sort of knowledge a person had on a topic, they would be essentially shut down, that sort of thing was already happening. But the problem is really they have sort of changed over time, what used to be kind of anti-establishment back, even back then, between 2005 and, I want to say like 2012 or so, there was this very definite shift to Wikipedia becoming essentially an establishment mouthpiece, which is amazing. I never would have guessed that right in 2001.

G. Greenwald:  Yeah. I mean, there are so many things about which that’s true that things that were once defined by an anti-establishment ethos have become incredibly pro-establishment. And I have to say, you know, maybe this is natural, but as somebody who’s long had a Wikipedia page about myself, I’ve always seen some things in there that were a little tenuous, maybe a little bit factually imperfect, but it seemed for a long time like there was generally an effort made to more or less get the facts right about what was included in my page. And I would say I really started noticing things gone completely awry when I really started to have what was perceived to be a breach with the political faction with which I had long been associated, at least in the public mind, which was kind of American liberalism, even the American left, surrounding my skepticism toward Russiagate, my disagreement with how Donald Trump was being characterized as kind of notion that he was this unprecedented evil and that everything and anything was justified in the name of stopping him. And I kind of became an opponent of the liberal establishment and its orthodoxies and tactics. And what I began to notice was that things that were on the Wikipedia page for over a decade with no changes – things about events in my life from ten, 20, 30 years ago that had never been altered – suddenly every sentence became a war to try and insert negative insinuations or all kinds of innuendo, all sorts of incredibly tendentious characteristic and descriptions about my work that were designed to be negative to the point where my entire page became an ideological war because my perceived political place in the ecosystem had shifted. And then, I began looking more into how Wikipedia functions and saw that some of these pages are written. I mean, we went through a couple of them only, and you can find thousands of examples where it doesn’t even seem like they’re pretending anymore or trying to pretend to any reality. I’m just wondering, like when did you start noticing that it was that extreme and if you could talk about some of the ways that that is accomplished.

Larry Sanger:  Okay. Well, it was a very gradual, it’s really, really hard to put a particular date on it. I first noticed that it was taking a really over-the-top biased point of view on when it shifted from the neutral point of view to a – I guess I would call it a scientistic point of view on any sort of controversial issues in science, the establishment view on that topic was pushed very heavily. That happened like, I don’t know, 2006, 2008, the global warming articles and articles about certain drugs and whatnot would have been changed back then. And then I started noticing around 2010 to 2015 that articles on like Eastern medicine, holistic medicine, which I’m not a big fan of or anything, but they were so obviously biased using – as you’ve noticed in your excellent monologue opening – that you know that they would just these dismissive epithets, you know, about these ancient traditions that you know even though I disagree with them, if I were writing an encyclopedia article, obviously you wouldn’t do that yet. There’d be a separate section maybe about, you know, Western reception of these ideas and whatnot anyway. And then, I think it really became… it got over the top. And in the tens, like between 2013 and 2018, and by the time Trump became president, it yeah, it was almost as bad as it is now. And it’s amazing. You know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has been as biased as Wikipedia has been. I mean, that’s saying something. I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and like the World Book not mentioning my favorite topics in and, you know, presenting only certain points of view in the way that, you know, establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.

G. Greenwald:  So, you know, I think one of the reasons why, at least to me, you know, I sometimes, for me, when I was putting the show together, I was talking to my team, you know, I was kind of saying, like on some level, it seems like you can just read these pages here, read the page about how they talk about the Ukraine and the Biden scandal, which obviously people can disagree on in terms of what the evidence demonstrates, but to just simply declare outright at the start that it’s replete with lies, it’s a conspiracy theory, it’s only designed to undermine Joe Biden… or especially the debate over the COVID pandemic, which simply takes the side of the establishment and Dr. Fauci in a way that not even they would express with such certainty in terms of the truth about what we know about Covid’s origins, that would almost be sufficient because I grew up as somebody who went to school, would look to encyclopedias, you know, the pre-Internet encyclopedias and the difference between tones is so obvious. And one of the hypotheses that I have – and I’m wondering what you think about this – is I was comparing earlier the trajectory of Wikipedia to a lot of the trends in corporate media, and to me, what seems to be the case is that, in a lot of ways, the emergence of Donald Trump kind of changed everything. As you say, it was really gradual. It was you can go back before that when kind of the Tea Party movement was emerging in the years of Obama and people started getting a lot more polarized. But to me, it seems like what ended up happening was the liberal establishment narrative was that Donald Trump was such a once-in-a-lifetime unprecedented menace that there’s no longer anything that can exist independent of ideology and political viewpoints, that even truth has to be subservient to the more important cause of attacking Donald Trump and the movement that formed around him. And a lot of the conventions of journalism have been completely cast aside within a very short period of time. The idea that you don’t editorialize is part of the narrative, the argument is really now that if you don’t editorialize constantly and from the start, you’re failing in your job as a journalist, that journalism requires you to constantly describe Trump as an authoritarian and Biden as a decent man. Otherwise, you’re not telling the truth. And it seems like a very similar thing has happened in Wikipedia, which is supposed to be an encyclopedia devoted to truth, that the premise seems to be that you don’t have truth anymore independent of the ideological outlook.

Larry Sanger:  Yeah, I think. Well, I think you’ve hit it on the nose. That doesn’t really explain, that describes what the problem is. In other words, they take their cues. So, it definitely explains that at one level, that the rank-and-file Wikipedians, they take their cues not from, you know, Wikipedia’s original neutrality policy or anything like that. They don’t care about that at all. They take their cues from basically CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times and whatever those outlets feel comfortable saying. And one also has to remember that they have declared like 80% of the major sources of news on the right to be unreliable officially that it’s in their policy at this point. A lot of people don’t realize that but it’s true and that really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say. But the deeper explanation I think is and I guess I’m going to offer a conspiracy theory now that essentially, I think that the left it’s not a big conspiracy. Everybody knows and believes this. Right? The left very, very deliberately seeks out to take control. Except that isn’t just the left. We’re learning that now, aren’t we? Right? But this Grayzone example that you pointed out. No, it’s, it’s the establishment. Yeah. And they have their own agenda. I’m not going to try to offer any opinions because it’s not something that I study as to how they bring that about. But it’s clear that between 2005 and 2015, it was on their radar. Wikipedia moved on to the establishment’s radar. And of course, we do have evidence that the CIA, even as early as I think was a virtual Griffiths, discovered this in 2008. I think something like the CIA and the FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia. I think I stopped doing that back then. No, and not just now, right, and we know that that intelligence now, a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online and where if not on websites like Wikipedia, right, so that they pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with. Or they just develop their own talent within the community, learning the Wikipedia game and then, you know, push the… what they want to say within with their own people. So that’s my that’s my take on that.

G. Greenwald:  Yeah, I think the point you raise is a crucial one. It’s one I emphasize so often, which is I really do believe now that the most relevant metric for understanding the world and it’s certainly how people are treated, is not so much left versus right, but anti-establishment versus subservient to the establishment. And ultimately, there are people who are more conservative, who are very much aligned with establishment politics. David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg, the two examples we used, didn’t get more liberal over the years. They just became useful to the establishment in a way that some people on the left like Grayzone, and I would put even RFK, Jr. He’s harder to find ideologically, but there’s certainly a lot of left-wing views that he has. He’s running to Biden slapped on the question of whether we should be aggressive toward China. Certainly, whether people want, whether we should be supporting the CIA and the military-industrial complex and things like Ukraine, and more than anything, though, he’s considered an enemy of the establishment. Let me just ask you about, as one of the last questions, what is the role of Google in all of this. I mean, I think this is kind of the key. And I wonder if – it’s for me, it’s kind of a chicken and egg question – I wonder if you can shed some light on it. Obviously, Google is a major part of why Wikipedia has grown significantly in terms of its impact. Is it that Google saw the potential of Wikipedia to become this kind of authoritative, über authoritative source that the Internet decided to kind of grab it, pump it up in order to be able to influence it? Or was Wikipedia already growing into becoming that and so Google decided, well, let’s kind of ride with that and see if we can kind of redirect it and help control it?  

Larry Sanger:  I mean, look, I am not an expert on the inner workings of Google or for that matter, Wikipedia after I left. So, what you say is very plausible. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that were true. But to be honest, I don’t know. What I do know is that Google has donated millions of dollars to Wikipedia over the years. Google has much more importantly pushed Wikipedia articles. And insofar as people who are in Google or advising Google, investing in Google, want the public to believe certain things. As long as Wikipedia is saying those things, then, those articles are going to tend to be pushed to the top. So, what we need to do, I have to get this in, what we need to do is to reach into the long tail of all the other encyclopedias. There are other encyclopedias, you know, there are. A lot.

G. Greenwald:  Can you talk about them? I know you were involved with one and are involved with one. There are a couple of alternatives that have a different model. Can you just talk people through that?

Larry Sanger:  A good, explicitly neutral encyclopedia of American politics is called Ballotpedia. It’s really good. And Ballotpedia articles, they don’t really rank very highly on Google in my experience. Let’s see. Although they can. They can. Let’s see what else. Well, on the right, there is Conservapedia. And on the left, there is what RationalWiki. That’s really bad. But anyway, that’s an example. There are a lot of others anyway, besides Wikipedia, and well, if you really want to see them and search all of them at once, I would say go to Encyclosearch.org or Encyclo Talk. And what my organization now is doing is collecting free encyclopedia articles from as many sources as we can. It takes time to set up new encyclopedias, to be crawled, or at least to be gradually absorbed, which is what we do. But we have 35 and growing encyclopedias in the system, and we are creating an open and free database and network of encyclopedias. Essentially, Wikipedia is part of it. So necessarily it’s going to be greater than Wikipedia because it’s going to include Wikipedia, but a lot more. And if you want to have an experience of, you know, comparing real, relatively old-fashioned encyclopedias with really so biased as to be twisted for Wikipedia articles, I think it would be a good place to start; EncycloReader and Encyclosearch.org. And, by the way, the software that we are using to aggregate these articles is all open source. You can spin up your own aggregator. And all of the articles are digitally signed which means that we can prove if somebody has tampered with them essentially. So, we’re trying to strike a blow against censorship and control of information by simply making it easier to find all of the other encyclopedias that are out there. And also, well, we’ve got very soon, like within a couple of weeks, there will be a WordPress plugin where people can push articles that they write on their own blogs, so, all across the web to the Encyclosphere, and then it will appear in, and I think we’re up to four different aggregators at this point.

G. Greenwald:  Well, we will definitely continue to follow the work that you’re doing. I mean, of course, the problem is that Google controls with such a stranglehold the most valuable real estate on the Internet and sometimes, of course, that is the great challenge – kind of wrestling control of the full information away from these Big Tech companies. But if there’s anything for which I have solidarity and empathy, it’s somebody who is a co-founder of an organization who thinks they’re creating something in order to advance certain values and then looks at what their creation has become and sees it is the exact opposite of what they think they’re creating. And I know from experience that it’s sometimes difficult to denounce something about your co-founder because it’s part of your legacy. You want it to be something that you’re proud of. You want it to be something that made a positive contribution to the world. And I think the fact that you’ve been willing to step up for so long and be a critic of this thing that you played such a vital role in creating requires a lot of courage, and it’s become extremely important that you’re doing that. I know, I’ve learned a lot from your critiques. It kind of attracted my attention to this topic, and I really appreciate your doing that. I appreciate your taking the time to come on and talk to us as well.

Larry Sanger:  Well, thanks for everything that you’ve done.

G. Greenwald:  All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Have a great evening.

So, there you have him. As I was saying, I certainly empathize with somebody who is the co-founder of an entity that they become horrified by, particularly because it ends up being a degradation vandalization of the exact defining values they thought they were advancing when they created that entity. Obviously, that happened to me at The Intercept. And I think the fact that you have one of two co-founders of Wikipedia denouncing the site for exactly what it has become in such direct and unflinching terms as he’s doing, creates the space necessary to give this critique credibility. So, it doesn’t just seem like the standard whining about things being biased.

So, as I said, we weren’t sure we were going to have him on and then, once he came out and we wanted to get him on and not make him wait but we do have some other evidence I think is incredibly important about exactly how this bias is perpetrated, and I think it’s very important to take a look at it instead of just observing the results, to take a look at what’s underneath the hood and see how specifically this is done.

So, let’s go back to this tweet here where (@johnbind2, July 26, 2023) somebody, just as a kind of illustration, compiled the section that is for far-left politicians in the U.S. versus the ones who are far-right because so much of this is accomplished through that kind of language that Larry Sanger is describing, where the language becomes sneering. It is all intended to make you very skeptical about something, what you call a conspiracy theorist versus what you call somebody who has been involved in controversy. All of that is deliberately cultivated to foster a particular viewpoint. And so, the same is true when you call somebody far right versus far left.

So, if you look at whom Wikipedia calls far right and far left, it’s not really surprising that – here’s the entire list of far-left politicians in parallel states. There is a grand total of 4 of them: the American Maoist group, the American Trotskyites, Kshama Sawant, who is a self-identified socialist who was on the city council in Seattle, and then Sam Webb, who is a self-identified communist.

These are the far-right politicians. Here they all are. You have just enormous numbers. So, this is obviously part of what I was suggesting earlier – you just kind of call people whatever you want to call them based on who you want to disparage. You have former members of the Senate; you have current members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene. You have Joe Kent, who is a member of the military, who got very disillusioned because his wife was killed in the war in Syria, he saw all kinds of horrible things in Iraq where he was serving. He became an antiwar populist. So, he gets labeled far right. He was attached to the Donald Trump movement. Madison Cawthorn, who is a former member of Congress. So, these are just how you play with word games and the fact that there’s a huge pile of people who get labeled far right, whereas very few people, almost nobody gets labeled far left unless they call themselves. That is very illustrative of the kind of bias that’s going on here.

Sanger alluded to this, but this is really the key to how everything is done. The way this bias is accomplished is largely through the game playing that they do with regard to who or what is and is not considered to be a “reliable source” of information. If something is deemed to be a reliable source of information, editors can justify the inclusion of almost anything as long as those entities have said it. But if something is to find outside the scope of what a reliable source is, then no matter what they report, no matter what they say, it cannot be used to edit a Wikipedia page. And this is, of course, very similar to the fraudulent disinformation industry, the way in which this entirely new industry has sprouted out of nowhere, funded by the same small handful of neoliberal billionaires like Pierre Omidyar and George Soros, we’ve gone through this disinformation industry several times. And the core premise of it is that if you can identify people who are qualified to identify disinformation, so-called disinformation experts. No field of discipline gives people conferred degrees in disinformation. It’s just a made-up title where you say that these are the people who are somehow trained to identify disinformation, then whatever they call disinformation – The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN can describe it as being a lie or a conspiracy theory or a product of disinformation, because these are the people who have been deemed – based on nothing – to be the reliable sources for identifying disinformation. And obviously, whoever is conferred with that title wields a great amount of power and you make sure that the only people to whom you give that title are people who spout establishment dogma and service development interests, which is, of course, exactly what they’ve done. That’s why those in that industry are funded in that way. That is the basis of censorship. So, if you say to Facebook or the U.S. government, what justifies you from demanding this information be suppressed? They’ll say, “Well, this has been determined to be disinformation by these disinformation experts.” And so, everything is about who gets that title. And exactly the same is true for the game that Wikipedia is playing, where they’ve created definitions for who is and is not a so-called reliable source. That in turn lets them play games with whatever they want to play games with by simply saying, “Well, these are the reliable sources and this is what they say.” Oh, you have somebody reporting the opposite story? They’re not a reliable source. They can’t be used. So, how reliable source is defined is crucial. It’s a linchpin to this entire game, to this entire manipulative effort. Unsurprisingly, they essentially define reliable sources to be the corporate media, large media corporations. It’s an authoritarian mindset. If you have a gigantic media corporation, that is reliable. Anybody who’s independent, anybody who is working on their own or with a small team or with an entity that is not yet credible, doesn’t matter what those people report, it’s basically nonexistent. They cannot be trusted inherently because of who they are.

You can go and read it for yourself – how they define it. It’s Wikipedia Reliable Sources, and they describe exactly what they do to deem something a reliable source or not. So, this is what a couple of the key sections read.

Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book and claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published sources are largely not acceptable. Self-published books and newsletters, personal pages on social networking sites, tweets, and posts on Internet forums are all examples of self-published media. Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.

 

Never use self-published sources as independent sources about other living people, even if the author is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer. (Wikipedia)

That means if you want to have a web page, an encyclopedia entry about Joe Biden, you can only use The New York Times, The Washington Post, or CNN but you can’t use independent media, such as myself, even though I have compiled every major journalism award in the West, I could not be deemed a reliable source for purposes of Wikipedia because, according to them, I self-publish. Even though I have a large team of editors and fact-checkers doesn’t make a difference. If you don’t work for a media corporation, you’re inherently excluded from use as a source for reporting on living people. That only can be large media corporations that do that.

The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content.

 

In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication. (Wikipedia)

So, in other words, if you have gigantic newsrooms and you’re a $1,000,000,000 corporation or a multi-billion-dollar corporation, inherently you’re going to be more reliable. Then somebody who has forged a more independent path. How does that make any sense? Especially when you look at the history of corporate media in the States. These are the people who lied the country into the Vietnam War through the Gulf of Tonkin propaganda, led the country to the Iraq war, told lies about the anthrax attacks, blaming Iraq for it at exactly the moment the country was trying to go to war with Iraq; called the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation; invented the entire concept Russiagate in the bowels of the CIA and FBI, and then spent years disseminating what Robert Mueller, after investigating with 18 months and unlimited budget, said could not be established in themselves Pulitzers for doing it. On some level, it must be the bigger the media corporation, the less trustworthy they are. That’s what you would do if you were trying to find the truth. But if you’re trying to propagandize the public, of course, you want to exclude anyone but mainstream media outlets because those are gigantic corporations that, of course, have an interest in maintaining establishment dogma. And that’s exactly what they do, and that’s why Wikipedia aligns so closely with it. It goes on.

News sources often contain both factual content and opinion content. News reporting from well-established news outlets is generally considered to be reliable for statements of fact (though even the most reputable reporting sometimes contains errors). News reporting from less-established outlets is generally considered less reliable for statements of fact. Most newspapers also reprint items from news agencies such as Reuters, Interfax, Agence France-Presse, United Press International, or the Associated Press, which are responsible for accuracy. The agency should be cited in addition to the newspaper that reprinted it. Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts or with no editorial oversight. (Wikipedia)

A poor reputation among whom? What does that mean, a poor reputation?” Who determines the reputation of a site? If you ask people about Daily Caller and you ask The New York Times or CNN about it, you’re going to get a much different perception of its reputation than if you ask conservative politicians or conservative sites. The Daily Caller does some of the best reporting on a lot of events in Washington, things on which nobody else reports but they haven’t been around for nearly as long as, say, The New York Times or The Washington Post. They’re not as big as those outlets. Their reputation is much poorer if you ask the people designated by liberal institutions to be experts and so all of this is, by design, incredibly subjective.

Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist […]

Again, widely acknowledged by whom as extremist?

[…] that are promotional in nature, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions.[9] Questionable sources are generally unsuitable for citing contentious claims about third parties, which include claims against institutions, persons living or dead, as well as more ill-defined entities. The proper uses of a questionable source are very limited.

 

Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book and claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published sources are largely not acceptable. Self-published books and newsletters, personal pages on social networking sites, tweets, and posts on Internet forums are all examples of self-published media. Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications. Never use self-published sources as independent sources about other living people, even if the author is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer. (Wikipedia)

So, this is crucial to the entire game that is being used on Wikipedia to produce the kind of articles we reviewed earlier. Obviously, if you get to define what a credible source is, just like if you could define who would that disinformation expert is, you control the entire determination of truth, and that’s how they’re gaming this site.

There are a lot of other ways the site is being gamed. Lots of liberal activist groups now see editing Wikipedia as a form of activism. Here is a leftist student newspaper, Student Life, and the headline is “Calling on All Activist Scholars: Let’s Edit Wikipedia.”

A lot of people on the left, in the liberal establishment, now see editing Wikipedia as a form of social activism because they get to shape this incredibly influential site that has been deemed authoritative by Google to align with their own ideological perspective. And it’s working, as we showed you.

Here’s another: “Editing as activism”: Fighting Bias and Misinformation on Wikipedia (March 4, 2018). This is from Melissa Nelson, a woman who identifies as a writer, an educator, and an archivist, from McGill University. That is the way in which this is being defined, editing Wikipedia as a form of political activism.

There have been studies about Wikipedia that have been very revealing of how the whole site is being gamed. One was from Purdue University, in 2017, the title of which is “Results of Wikipedia study may surprise.” And it reads:

The mysterious world of Wikipedia isn’t such a mystery anymore to a pair of researchers who conducted a 10-year study on the free online encyclopedia.

 

Matei says the top 1 percent of writers/editors on Wikipedia create about 80 percent of the content. That ratio, he says, was shown in their study to be consistent.

 

Matei, director of the Purdue Data Storytelling Network, and Britt have co-authored a new book on their work. The book, titled “Structural Differentiation in Social Media: Adhocracy, Entropy and the ‘1% Effect,’” reinterprets the idea that Wikipedia is a commons-based peer production site “It is built by peers, but some peers are more equal than others, at least in terms of effort,” said Matei.

 

“The book presents some interesting findings about the way in which a new elite has emerged in the world of communication and about the way in which social media groups evolve,” Matei says. “Adhocracy – the idea that crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia aren’t these decentralized and spontaneous ventures – is orchestrated by an organizational system that combines a stable power hierarchy with individual mobility.”​ (Purdue University. November 6, 2017)

And there have been all kinds of stories about how one or two or three editors that seem like they’re operated by committee, even though they use the same name because they edit all day and night in order to manipulate content to adhere to liberal content seem to be some sort of committee.

There have been reports on how major entities now hire groups and firms that are experts in manipulating Wikipedia content. Here from the Huffington Post, in 2019, was a report on how Facebook, Axios, the news site, and NBC all paid this one guy to whitewash their Wikipedia pages:

Axios may not have expressed its worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who’s now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com, to do damage control.

 

Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign — if largely flattering — stats about Axios’ accomplishments) in February 2018.

 

Several NBC employees, including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and NBC Chairman Andy Lack, benefited from Sussman’s intervention, too. In one proposed edit, Sussman attempted to argue that on NBC News’ Wikipedia page, the mention of criticism directed at NBC over its handling of Matt Lauer constituted a violation of Wikipedia’s rules, since “it does not summarize the opposing point of view.”

 

Facebook’s PR agency paid Sussman to tweak Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s page. He also spent over a year lobbying Wikipedia’s editor to create a page for Facebook’s global head of PR, Caryn Marooney, despite being repeatedly turned down over her lack of notability. But Sussman, to many editors’ dismay, is indefatigable, and he eventually triumphed. (Huffington Post. Mar 14, 2019)

So, there you see just professionals gaming the system on behalf of liberal corporations and liberal news outlets to make their entries more favorable. As I said, I saw this firsthand with my own page. There’s nothing like having firsthand knowledge to make you understand how something works. Where for a decade my Wikipedia page was very stable and almost entirely positive because I was perceived as being an ally of left-liberal politics and left-liberal political culture and when this perceived breach happened, in 2016, largely overarching and then Donald Trump, you could watch in real-time every one of my sections and every sentence and every new section that got added, transforming it to something derogatory. And it continues to happen to this very day where entries that have been on the site on my page for over a decade unchanged, are now constantly being changed. But the addition of new words with slanted perspectives, is always negative, as a result of my perceived new position in the political ecosystem.

One of the victims of this, The Grayzone, whose Wikipedia page is that joke we showed you earlier, did some investigation about exactly how the Wikipedia system is being manipulated and they uncovered some very interesting facts that we checked, and they were largely true. The title of the article is Wikipedia, The Corrupt Encyclopedia. “Wikipedia formerly censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing.”

You heard Larry Sanger before saying that the U.S. security state, the CIA, and the FBI have been caught many times editing pages that are of direct interest to the security state, about foreign enemies, about wars, and about various policies they support or oppose. And obviously, they’re going to be doing that to the journalist and the sites that are most devoted to opposing the U.S. security state. That’s, of course, what they do. They have always done that. And here’s what The Grayzone investigation found:

Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia is censoring independent news websites by adding them to an official blacklist of taboo “deprecated” media outlets.

 

The Grayzone is among the news websites targeted by the censorship campaign. Others include leftist and anti-imperialist outlets like MintPress News and the Latin American news broadcaster Telesur, along with several prominent right-wing political sites, including the Daily Caller.

 

Even more troubling is the fact that governments, intelligence agencies, and large corporations maintain significant influence over Wikipedia, editing the encyclopedia to push their agendas, while carefully monitoring articles and policing new edits.

 

The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and fossil fuel colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles.

 

There has been some coverage in alternative media, for instance, of the mysterious editor Philip Cross. This lone user spends hours per day, virtually every week, obsessively monitoring and editing articles to smear anti-war journalists and politicians.

 

Joining The Grayzone on the Wikipedia blacklist is MintPress News, an independent left-leaning anti-war news website also based in the United States.

 

This group of centrist Wikipedia editors also deprecated The Daily Caller, a right-wing website that the editors claimed publishes “false or fabricated information.”

 

At the same time, Wikipedia has given the interventionist pro-NATO blog Bellingcat a green light as a credible source on par with the AP. (The Grayzone. June 10, 2020)

We devoted the entire show, a couple of months ago, to presenting the evidence that Bellingcat is overwhelmingly funded by Western intelligence agencies, including the parts of the United States government, the National Endowment for Democracy, that is explicitly touted as a government agency or controlled by the government that does the dirty work of the CIA, but out in the open. But Bellingcat is listed as credible as The New York Times. That’s the way in which this manipulation works.

Wikipedia editors have also determined that the now-defunct neoconservative, staunchly pro-war website The Weekly Standard is a “generally reliable” source, on the same level as the AFP. (The Grayzone. June 10, 2020)

In the trajectory of the history of the United States, you cannot find a news outlet that has lied more destructively and more casually than the New York Times – or the New York or the Atlantic. We recounted all the disinformation campaigns earlier that they spread that caused immense harm and damage. And yet, Wikipedia deems all of them generally reliable because of the agenda they dutifully serve. Wikipedia is just like those corporate media outlets. They operate in exactly the same way.

Here is a tweet from the author of that Grayzone article, Ben Norton, in February 2020:

Wikipedia is a scam. It’s a propaganda vehicle for intelligence agencies, govt, corporations, and PR flacks. This extremely shady “user” Philip Cross edits all day every day, 7 am to 11 pm, posting nonstop pro-war propaganda – including almost every edit on MaxBlumenthal’s age (@BenjaminNorton. Feb 12, 2020)

Max Blumenthal is one of The Grayzone’s writers. You see the entries on Max Blumenthal’s page, almost all of which come, the majority of which come from one user, Philip Cross, who has obviously devoted a significant part of his life to ensuring that Mac Blumenthal’s Wikipedia page is intended to malign him and make sure that anyone who reads it instantly dismisses him as a source of information because Max Blumenthal is one of the most vocal opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

There has been reporting on people like this Philip Cross from Five Filters.org in August 2020. They write:

Philip Cross’s bias and hostile editing of Wikipedia isn’t very subtle. He’s banned from editing in the area of British politics, but it happened after a huge fuss was made and UK media reported on it. Yet he’s still allowed to write over 50% of @MaxBlumenthal’s Wikipedia entry. (@FiveFilters.org. Aug 2, 2020)

Kit Klarenberg, who is an anti-establishment journalist, in September 2022, wrote:

What’s particularly eerie is primary vandal of @TheGrayzoneNews wiki entry was user named MHawk10. Their other most edited pages were Uyghur Genocide, Adrian Zenz, Radio Free Asia and @MaxBlumenthal. (@KitKlarenberg. Sept. 26, 2022)

So, you can see that there is an extremely concerted effort to ensure that whoever is an opponent of establishment ideology is discredited and basically disappeared from Wikipedia’s pages by ensuring that they can never be used as a site, which means anything we report on this show, despite my credentials as a journalist being infinitely greater than almost everybody who works inside the news corporations that are deemed credible, is instantly excluded. There’s nothing that I can report that could be used to provide balance to establishment dogma on the Wikipedia page because I don’t work for a big media corporation. And yet, the corporate media outlets that are obvious propaganda outlets are the ones deemed authoritative, and that’s why almost every page perfectly reads the way it would if it were written by Joe Biden’s White House team with no exaggeration. The examples we showed you about the origins of COVID, Joe Biden and Ukraine, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, about RFK, Jr. totally comport to corporate media narratives and don’t even pretend to be encyclopedias at all. It’s not subtle, it’s incredibly blatant. And yet Google pumps up this site, directs everyone to it, and implicitly announces to the world that it’s authoritative, which is what makes it so vital to deconstruct and understand.

Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald