Amerika

The Left has steadily been gaining power for centuries with a few little hiccups like the Cold War, in which people briefly realized that lottery-playing ideas like socialism end badly. Otherwise it has been a steady advance since they started tearing down the Kings.

This puts the shoe on the other foot. Where the Left were revolutionaries against an existing system, they could play the role of “grass is greener” thinking and offer a conjectural Utopia in order to seduce people to their system. Now they have their system, and the counter-revolutionaries who oppose it are pointing out flaws.

Leftists currently find themselves in a global war against free speech in order to prevent criticism of the Regime. They realize that if people notice too much that has gone wrong, Leftist power may be interrupted or go away. For this reason they wage a propaganda war and censor, deplatform, and surveil anyone who fails to be compliant.

As part of this, starting during the Clinton years, Leftists weaponized the internet through consolidation into a few big companies that took orders from Washington. For some time, we have pointed out the failure of Wikipedia as part of this.

Social media got in the act too, mainly because the failing internet industry needs government allies, promoting a government propaganda campaign:

The Biden administration worked in tandem with social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to censor statements they deemed “misinformation” about topics including the COVID-19 pandemic, two Republican state attorneys general said Thursday as they pushed for the release of emails between top executive branch officials and Big Tech titans.

In a petition filed Wednesday in Louisiana federal court, state Attorney General Jeff Landry and his Missouri counterpart Eric Schmitt charged that “dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies” engaged in a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,’” with the “intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.”

In any sane era, this would bring out the pitchforks, but somehow having a government propaganda machine on the free internet bothered few people:

So far, 67 officials or agencies — including the FBI — have been accused in the lawsuit of violating the First Amendment by pressuring Facebook, Twitter and Google to censor users for alleged misinformation or disinformation.

Not only was this ignored by government, but media covered up the propaganda campaign which censored “misinformation” and “disinformation” while sending out its own messages unimpeded, falsely portraying them as public opinion:

Yes, it’s a big yawn that so many former FBI and CIA officials were embedded in senior management roles at Twitter and Facebook. And not just the FBI’s top lawyer and Russiagate quarterback, James Baker, who was hired by Twitter five months before the 2020 election; at least a dozen others joined after Trump won the 2016 election.

It’s a big yawn to see evidence that Twitter became a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and federal government agencies, and that the FBI has been coercing social media companies to violate the First Amendment and interfere with elections.

Search engines are only reliable to a certain degree, and they depend on Wikipedia for easy results to just about any topic. Without Wikipedia, the social media and search engine ecosystem falls apart. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is basically corrupt to the core.

Wikipedia encourages character attacks by a cabal of Leftist editors who specialize in spreading propaganda in an internet where revenues are declining because internet users do not represent the general population.

However, Leftists understand one thing that conservatives do not: instead of working solely for your own wealth, you find a way to spread it around. This creates an incestuous little circle of professional Leftists who keep giving each other plum jobs so that they can continue their Leftist activism.

For example, consider how NPR’s new CEO comes from a Wikipedia background:

The board of directors of NPR announced today that it has selected Katherine Maher to become its next president and chief executive officer. Katherine [[[ Maher ]]] has spent her career at the intersection of democracy, human rights, information, and technology. She is a mission-driven leader who recently completed a highly successful tenure at the Wikimedia Foundation where she drove unprecedented growth in global readership and impact, while doubling fundraising income and raising an endowment to ensure Wikipedia’s enduring sustainability.

She was a successful fundraiser? Consider that Wikipedia’s money goes to professional Leftists instead of any mission to improve the internet:

So what are they spending the other 166 million dollars on? Well, for starters, they give away 24 million to various organizations. Which ones? It’s hard to say exactly due to lack of transparency. However, again, Lunduke did the important investigative work, and found that most of the money is managed by the Tides foundation. What is that? Well, Wikipedia itself says:

Tides Foundation is a left-leaning donor advised fund based in the United States.[4] It was founded in San Francisco in 1976 by Drummond Pike. Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically progressive.[5] An affiliated group, Tides Advocacy, is a “massive progressive incubator.”[6] Tides has received substantial funding from George Soros.[7]

Aha, right, so the money is mainly being channeled behind the scenes into unrelated political advocacy.

The janitors who edit the stories do it for free, and most of the Wikipedia entries are stuff cribbed by failed college and graduate students from their textbooks, if not outright lifted from Leftist sources. Wikipedia enforces “notability” standards which means only Leftist media approved sources can be cited.

In other words, Wikipedia is like an early version of AI, republishing through plagiarism other sources, and by doing so, effectively keeps those out of the search results. This is killing off the independent internet and replacing it with the “Big Six” internet companies and the various spammers that pay to advertise with them.

If you notice that search results have become a lot less useful over the past decade, and that you get a lot more blogs and commercial sites than research sources, this is why: the Google plan has always been to exclude the little guy and go back to corporate and Leftist approved media.

Digging into Wikipedia reveals that far from being a People’s Encyclopedia, it is in fact a propaganda organ for the Left:

Although the free online encyclopedia is good at general information about broad topics, it’s terribly inaccurate for anything political, contentious or controversial. If it wasn’t for section 230 immunity, many of its articles would be subject to claims of libel, defamation and slander. Recently, several outlets have talked about how the Wikimedia Foundation raises far more money than necessary for its day to day operations, using much of their funding for political actions.

Wikipedia may still have a lot of valuable information, but it takes effort and skill to maintain your privacy and avoid rhetoric while browsing Wikipedia.

It exists only because it serves the needs of industry at this time. If nothing else, it compiles better sources into a handy guide for lazy people, which makes it perfect for AIs to scrape. As the search engine industry moves to computer-assisted searches, Wikipedia will become yet another anonymous source for the machine language learning algorithms.

This presents a further challenge in the future, since Wikipedia is propaganda that we are now feeding into children and AIs alike:

Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find. The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major parties.

In other words—and this is the point crucial to evaluating an article’s neutrality—a neutral article is written not to take sides on issues of controversy. It does not matter whether one or both sides believe their point of view is totally factual and supported with incontrovertible proof. How many times, in politics and in many walks of life, have we seen controversies in which both sides can cite apparently rigorous studies, or chapter and verse, or original source material that, they claim, show their view is absolutely certain? In such cases, a neutral resource like Wikipedia is bound by policy not to take a side. Yet it does.

Political scandals are a good example where sources are carefully lined up on both sides. There were many controversies over “scandals” plaguing Obama’s presidency. But in fact, the only scandals that I could find in Wikipedia’s Obama article were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash. You might find this to be objectively correct, if you are a Democrat; but you cannot claim that this is a neutral treatment, considering that the other major U.S. party would, citing other ostensibly credible sources, treat the subject very differently. On such topics, neutrality in any sense worth the name essentially requires that readers not be able to detect the editors’ political alignment.

There is a problem with propaganda sources though. You control them for now, but what happens when the bad guys take over? All of that power goes to serve another source.

The West may find it appalling, but totalitarian-ish regimes are now repurposing Wikipedia for their own propaganda organs:

Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light.

Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with “reliability and neutrality.”

No one can really object. After all, Wikipedia has served as a propaganda organ of the Western Left for some time. Now others get their chance as well to use this devastating tool for controlling minds, but for their purposes, not those of the small cabal of professional Leftists who have controlled Wikipedia for two decades.

Tags: drummond pike, jimmy whales, larry sanger, propaganda, search foundation, tides advocacy, wikipedia