Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Wikipedia: A Disinformation Operation? from Swiss Propaganda Research

Posted on March 10, 2020 | 1 comment

If you spend any time at all delving through Wikipedia, especially if you research sensitive political and historical topics, you’re going to run into propaganda masquerading as disinterested articles. From Swiss Propaganda Research at swprs.org:

Wikipedia Manipulation

Wikipedia is generally thought of as an open, transparent, and mostly reliable online encyclopedia. Yet upon closer inspection, this turns out not to be the case.

In fact, the English Wikipedia with its 9 billion worldwide page views per month is governed by just 500 active administrators, whose real identity in many cases remains unknown.

Moreover, studies have shown that 80% of all Wikipedia content is written by just 1% of all Wikipedia editors, which again amounts to just a few hundred mostly unknown people.

Obviously, such a non-transparent and hierarchical structure is susceptible to corruption and manipulation, the notorious “paid editors” hired by corporations being just one example.

Indeed, already in 2007, researchers found that CIA and FBI employees were editing Wikipedia articles on controversial topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo military prison.

Also in 2007, researchers found that one of the most active and influential English Wikipedia administrators, called “Slim Virgin”, was in fact a former British intelligence informer.

More recently, another highly prolific Wikipedia editor going by the false name of “Philip Cross” turned out to be linked to UK intelligence as well as several mainstream media journalists.

In Germany, one of the most aggressive Wikipedia editors was exposed, after a two-year legal battle, as a political operative formerly serving in the Israeli army as a foreign volunteer.

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Posted in Governments, Intelligence, Media, Propaganda

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The Problem of Wikipedia, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on November 28, 2019 | 1 comment

Just because it’s in Wikipedia doesn’t mean it’s true. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

Over the course of my life I have watched integrity shrivel up and die everywhere in the Western world. It is not like it was ever really abundant, but there was a goodly amount of it, and it had authority. People, especially those in public life, weren’t shameless as they are today.

In the past decade I have watched the disappearance of free speech. An independent media disappeared in the last year of the Clinton regime when 6 mega-corporations were permitted to concentrate 90% of the media into their hands. Today free speech protected in the US Constitution is not valued as highly as the “feelings” of self-described “victim groups” who are offended by everything from truthful statements to traditional figures of speech. Even scientific discussion of the genetic basis of intelligence gives “offense” as does the use of gender-specific pronouns such as he and she.

Obviously false statements can be self-declared as true as when a biological male declares himself female and competes in women’s sports. Those who object to the obvious charade are declared “transphobic” and have to apologize. Sometimes they are fired for insisting on biological fact.

Exercising press freedom, as Julian Assange did, today brings charges of espionage and is misrepresented as a threat to national security. The media speak with the same voice, and it is the voice that serves the ruling elites. Truth is nowhere in the picture. The only purpose of the media today is to control the explanations for the elites. The media throughout the Western world is merely a Ministry of Propaganda. The young, never having experienced a free press or free speech, do not know what they are.

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Posted in Education, Government, Politics

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It Said That? 5/23/18

Posted on May 23, 2018 | 2 comments

TWA Flight 800, Gina Haspel’s record, MK-Ultra, Skripal, Libya, Aleppo, and John McCain’s inglorious career and life…the theme of tonight’s postings is memories perpetrators would rather flush down the memory hole. So tonight’s quote is the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry on the memory hole:

A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party’s Ministry of Truthsystematically re-created all potential historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete.

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Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 21, 2018 | 1 comment

If you use Wikipedia as a source of information on political events or history, you soon notice it’s slanted towards the government and intelligence agencies’ versions of events. Caitlin Johnstone explores how it’s done, from medium.com:

If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days. Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.

Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland“, about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”

Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader“, about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”

Here’s one from the day before titled “Here’s how Sweden is preparing for an information war ahead of its general election“, about how the Swedish Security Service and Civil Contingencies Agency are “gearing up their efforts to prevent disinformation during the election campaigns.”

This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.

To continue reading: Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop

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Posted in Government, History, Intelligence

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