Wikipedia Co-Founder Says Website Has Become Untrustworthy: ‘Nasty, Complex Games’ to Manipulate Articles
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said in an interview this week that his website had become an untrustworthy pawn for the “wealthy and powerful” to to “shore up their power.”
“You can trust it to give a reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything. Can you trust it always to give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” Sanger said in a Wednesday interview with LockdownTV.
Host Freddie Sayers noted one example of a contentious Wikipedia entry was John McAfee. The software founder reportedly committed suicide, though conspiracy theories about alternatives have arisen, partially due to the fact that said in 2019 “If I suicide myself, I didn’t.” Facts surrounding those theories are mostly omitted from his Wikipedia page.
“What we have to realize … is that if we put one version of reality out there, then we are, first of all, manipulating what everyone is supposed to believe,” Sanger replied. “Maybe it doesn’t matter that much how how John McAfee died. But … there’s a lot of issues that do matter. we’re talking about how we should think about all of the issues that that inform how, how we vote, how our representatives, initiatives are going to be received by the public and so on, and so forth. So if only one version of the facts is is allowed, then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia, in order to, to shore up their their power.”
Corporations and people in sensitive positions have aggressively used paid Wikipedia editors in recent years to remove negative information. One example emerged in 2019 with the revelation that NBC’s Chuck Todd used one paid editor, Ed Sussman, to make changes to his page that included removing a reference to a 2016 dinner party that Todd and his wife hosted for Hillary Clinton’s communications director. Axios similarly used Sussman to puff up its own page and to remove unflattering information about one of its reporters, Jonathan Swan.
“Wikipedia is known, now, by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world … so there is a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the articles say what somebody wants them to say,” Sanger added.
He cited references to scandal involving Ukraine and President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, as another example.
“The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him,” Sanger said. “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. … Very little of that can be found in Wikipedia. What little can be found is extremely biased and reads like a defense counsel’s brief, really.”
Watch above via LockdownTV.
