Mark Zuckerberg can wakeboard with the American flag all he wants. It’ll take more than that to convince conservatives that Big Tech – led by Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube – is not out to silence them.
Now, Wikipedia is part of the club.
On Friday, Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, claimed the online reference source was controlled by editors determined to present the “establishment,” “center-left” view of the world.
Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, but left the company a year later, gave the interview to Lockdown TV.
“You can trust it to give a reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything,” Sanger said of Wikipedia. “Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is.”
As one example, Sanger noted that early on, Wikipedia would frame a president’s record with “multiple different points of view, reasonably, fairly laid out.”
Today, not so much.
“Wikipedia is known, now, by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world,” said Sanger “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 himself pointed out that President Joe Biden’s Wikipedia entry is filled with an “extremely biased” interpretation of the corruption allegations about him. It “reads like a defense counsel’s brief,” said Sanger.
“The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him,” Sanger added. “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.”
“I think that there are a lot of people who would be highly motivated to go in and make the article more neutral, more politically neutral, but they’re not allowed to,” Sanger asserted.
“Wikipedia,” Sanger continued, “is pretty reliably establishment in its viewpoint, whatever the viewpoint is, which is ironic considering its origins from a couple of libertarians who, at least in the beginning, were really tolerant and open to all sorts of anti-establishment views being canvassed within the article.”
Sanger then criticized Wikipedia for rejecting content from places like the right-leaning British tabloid The Daily Mail, which Wikipedia labeled an “unreliable source” back in 2017.
“So what does that mean?” Sanger said. “It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream, center-left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.”
“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,” Sanger added.
Wikipedia, Sanger added, “seems to assume that there is only one legitimate defensible version of the truth on any controversial question.”
And that view typically comes from the left, he maintained.
“The word for it is propaganda,” he said.
Late last year, The Free Press ran a piece from Larry Sanger titled, “Social Media Stupidifies and Radicalizes Us,” it’s a must-read.
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