John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Never Donate to Wikipedia - They Slander People Who Tell the Truth”
The problems with Wikipedia go well beyond slandering selected people.
The site long ago joined other American Internet tech giants such as Google and Facebook and Amazon in assisting the covert forces of the American power establishment.
Just as the Internet is now saturated with commercial advertising, it has become saturated with political propaganda and disinformation.
I think it started with many respectable-looking sites being created just for the purpose a decade or more ago, sites that tended only to publish certain points of view on many matters, that heavily censored material not in keeping with rather arbitrary standards, and whose sources of revenue, considering their expensive glossy appearance and frequent updating, were mysterious.
But just special-purpose sites proved not enough. The political-influence people have penetrated a great many broader, seemingly helpful sites, Wikipedia being perhaps the most obvious.
An alert reader can see it on Wikipedia, just in the number and speed with which articles on certain topics appear, as well as in the nature of how they are written. Always with a clear but fairly quietly-stated slant. Always quite professional in appearance, entirely unlike what we saw in the early days of Wikipedia.
It has become an entirely different kind of publication than what it was when it started.
Long and highly referenced pieces appear rather quickly, as if on command, about important geopolitical topics of the day. They just scream origins from teams, as in the CIA or State Department or Pentagon or NSA.
The teams of Wikipedia authors function much like the teams of "trolls" on the Internet who are paid by governments to disrupt discussions at various comment sites. Israel, for example, has run at least two groups of such “trolls” - organized IDF teams and others, as out-of-work students, paid subsidies - to diffuse discussions, plant disinformation, and just generally to kick dust in people's faces. At certain newspaper and political sites and especially on certain topics, they resemble swarms of flies.
Countless articles on Wikipedia now function the same way, though generally with far higher standards of respectable appearance and tone. Wikipedia does still want to maintain appearances of authority and respectability.
And on many topics, ones with absolutely no political dimension, as articles on math or nutrition or geology, there are good articles to be found, some perhaps even contributed by some of the same people submitting other stuff in order to keep bolstering the site's reputation for encyclopedic information.
But on any topic with any possible political or special-interest dimension – history, books and writers, journalism, cinema, social topics, and others – you will find the new class of “trolls” busily at work. Perhaps “worker-bee drones” would be a better descriptive name than “trolls.” The site is saturated with them. Well, there’s really only one set of interest groups, those serving American empire, with such large resources to do such a job.
In many ways, the total effort by the America’s establishment to influence us resembles what we saw once from the Catholic Church, despite great changes in form and technology. The Church published lists of acceptable books. It censored the contents of books and articles. It limited what was kept in libraries. It simply banned some books and writing. And not many decades ago, it tried hard for a long time to influence what commercial films people could see.
Authority with great power and immense interests to protect always behaves that way. No matter what the particular set of beliefs and ideologies. That’s just one of the reasons it remains always a battle to discover and establish truth.
