SUMMARY
- Wikipedia has recently been in the spotlight for its political bias, facing interrogation from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in addition to a spate of news coverage highlighting the online encyclopedia’s political bias.
- Multiple investigations have confirmed that Wikipedia is run by a tiny clique of mostly-anonymous editors, with 1 percent of users responsible for 80 percent of edits.
- CBS recently ran a story on “the man behind a third of what’s on Wikipedia,” a single individual employed full-time in the records office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, under DHS.
- Wikipedia has been promoted by proponents of “media literacy” as a tool to counter disinformation, while its founder Jimmy Wales has served as an advisor to the well-known censorship industry outfit NewsGuard. The founder also launched his own counter-disinformation project called WikiTribune.
- Other key Wikipedia figures, such as former Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher, have close ties to the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Wikipedia is sold to the public as an experiment in democratic openness, billing itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” In practice, it is dominated by a tiny clique of anonymous editors, and hosted by a foundation, Wikimedia, whose leading figures are tightly tied to both the censorship industry and its backers in the U.S. security state.
The domination of Wikipedia by a tiny clique has been an open secret for some time. In 2017, a 10-year study on Wikipedia edits from 2001 – 2010 found that 80 percent of edits were made by just 1 percent of users. During this period, as reported MIT Technology Review in 2013, established editors installed a number of bureaucratic roadblocks to ensure that most new editors’ contributions are immediately deleted — oftentimes by an automated process. Likely as a result, the one-year retention rate for editors plummeted from over 40 percent in 2004 to just over 10 percent in 2009.
Halfaker’s study, which he conducted with a Minnesota colleague and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, analyzed Wikipedia’s public activity logs. The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try.
The researchers quoted by MIT Technology Review offered a tongue-in-cheek recommendation that Wikipedia change its motto from “The encyclopedia that anyone can edit” to “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”
More recently, CBS News ran a feature on Steven Pruitt, “the man behind a third of what’s on Wikipedia,” a single individual responsible for 3 million edits and 35,000 articles on the online encyclopedia. Unlike MIT Technology Review, CBS did not comment on how the dominance of super-editors like Pruitt, who in his day job works under the aegis of DHS in the records office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, clashes with Wikipedia’s continued branding as a decentralized, democratic encyclopedia.
The prominence of Wikipedia in search results, combined with the insular clique of editors has created a lucrative market for those who are able to get edits on Wikipedia to stick. In 2007, it was reported that FBI and CIA computers were used to edit Wikipedia pages on the Iraq War and the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Since then, methods have grown more sophisticated, with corporations and other institutions relying on private consultants to conduct Wikipedia edits. A of 2015, the industry of paid Wikipedia editors was already prolific.
All of the problems identified in the early 2010s – a bureaucratic clique, near-instant rejection of edits from newcomers, and paid editing – continue to plague Wikipedia. Despite these issues, the political establishment and censorship industry have embraced Wikipedia, promoting it as part of their “media literacy” efforts.
The SIFT Method
The field of “media literacy” arose in response to the disinformation panic whipped up by the censorship industry. In a nutshell, “media literacy” consists of training people which media sources to trust and distrust.
The notion that the public needs to be trained to avoid certain news sources has made its way into schools. A California law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 requires all schools in the state to teach “media literacy classes,” or, as USA Today described it, classes on “recognizing fake news.” The Foundation for Freedom Online has previously explained how “media literacy” aims to smuggle the censorship industry’s preferred political indoctrination into schools.
One approach in media literacy is the SIFT method (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims). This approach touts the benefits of Wikipedia, despite its anonymous and largely unaccountable editors, as a bulwark against disinformation. Publicly available SIFT method guides describe Wikipedia in glowing terms:
Wikipedia is broadly misunderstood by faculty and students alike. While Wikipedia must be approached with caution, especially with articles that are covering contentious subjects or evolving events, it is often the best source to get a consensus viewpoint on a subject.
Because the Wikipedia community has strict rules about sourcing facts to reliable sources, and because authors must adopt a neutral point of view, its articles are often the best available introduction to a subject on the web.
Wikipedia’s commitment to a “neutral point of view” is repeated uncritically by the SIFT guide, ignoring data going back over 10 years that document the website’s liberal bias, or that mainstream conservative news sites (including Fox News) are no longer accepted as sources on Wikipedia.
To say that the SIFT method is an instrument of the censorship industry is an understatement. It’s the brainchild of Mike Caulfield, a member of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, one of the four organizations that made up the Election Integrity Partnership.
The EIP, as documented by FFO, was set up at the suggestion of DHS, and played a leading role censoring online discourse in the 2020 election. In 2021, the taxpayer-funded U.S. National Science Foundation awarded $750,000 to Caufield and three of his colleagues to develop targeted “educational interventions” to train the public in how to spot and reject online “misinformation.”
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia was co-founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Sanger and Jimmy Wales have since gone their separate ways, taking opposite sides on the debate over Wikipedia’s political bias. Sanger, who cut ties with Wikipedia in 2007, has said the platform is “broken beyond repair,” and a hub of politically biased “propaganda” for the establishment. Wales, who remains Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, has repeatedly defended the platform against mounting evidence of political bias.
Unlike Sanger, Wales has also cosied up to the censorship industry. Wales sat on NewsGuard’s now-discontinued advisory board, alongside former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden, former State Department official Richard Stengel, former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and others.
In 2019, as NewsGuard rolled out its blacklisting products domestically and globally, Wales said:
“NewsGuard’s Nutrition Labels are an effective, wonderfully designed, and unique tool for helping people understand who is feeding them the news. I’m delighted to be associated with NewsGuard.”
While Wales raved about NewsGuard’s effectiveness, Wikipedia seems to be excluded from NewsGuard’s primary feature – the rating system, where sites are rated on a reliability score of 1 – 100 in reports called “nutrition labels.”
While NewsGuard’s nutrition label for Wikipedia explains the site’s potential for inaccuracy, NewsGuard completely refrains from the website a numerical score. This is in contrast to its top competitor, Encyclopedia Britannica, which has a rating of 87.5 out of 100.
Before NewsGuard shot to prominence in the censorship industry – indeed, before it even launched – Wales was eager to gain a foothold in the nascent censorship industry. His attempt to do so, which did not enjoy much success, was called WikiTribune.
WikiTribune, launched in 2017 with support from prolific censorship-funder Craig Newmark, paired mainstream journalists with an “army” of volunteer editors to fact-check and curate stories. Speaking to reporters at WikiTribune’s launch, Wales admitted that his main motivation was opposition to Donald Trump:
Although the site is launching at the beginning of the UK general election campaign, Wales said the impetus for the project came from the US.
“Someone I know convinced me to give Trump 100 days before making my mind up,” he said, “but then on day one Kellyanne Conway came out and said her ‘alternative facts’ line. That was when I really decided to move forward.”
WikiTribune was not a success. The Times described its launch as “weak,” with its first article attracting “derision” from supporters along with canceled subscriptions. Undeterred, Wales rolled the project into WT Social, later renamed to Trust Cafe, a social network that describes itself as “emphatically not a free speech platform.”
From Trust Cafe’s FAQ:
Is Trust Café a ‘Free Speech Platform’?
No. Emphatically not. Trust Café’s mission is to provide a non-toxic social media platform, which cannot happen in an environment where anything goes. We take a proactive stance against hate speech, harassment, and misinformation.
Trust Cafe has a pecking order, almost like a social credit score. It gives each user a “trust score” that determines if their content will be suppressed or promoted, among other things:
A user’s trust level influences how and where their content is visible to others. It also affects how much weight their votes carry, and can confer some additional permissions at higher levels. Trust Café uses a trust-based system wherein user’s trust levels determine their content’s visibility to others, weight of their votes, and additional permissions.
As Wales built his “emphatically not free speech” platform, Newmark deepened his support for Wales-linked projects, pouring $2.5 million into the Wikimedia Foundation in 2019, characterizing it as a bulwark against “disinformation,” and calling Wikipedia the place “where facts go to live.”
Katherine Maher
Katherine Maher is just as interesting as Wales, for different reasons. Her terms as executive director (2016 – 19) and then CEO (2019 – 21) of Wikimedia overlapped not just with Donald Trump’s first term in office, but also span the years when the online censorship apparatus grew to its maximum strength, with the ability to censor the 2020 elections and capacity-build in the period afterwards through U.S. government funding.
Maher’s resume includes work as an operative for government cut-out institutions closely affiliated with the foreign policy regime-change establishment, as reported by The Grayzone in June 2020. Her experience includes stints at the Council for Foreign Relations, the Eurasia Group, UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), The World Bank, the Open Technology Fund, and The Truman National Security Project.
All of these organizations can be described as instruments of the western foreign policy establishment, but the National Democratic Institute (NDI) affiliation is particularly revealing. The NDI is the Democrat-aligned wing of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the principal soft-power arm of U.S. regime change operations, that took over key responsibilities from the CIA in the 1980s.
In 1997, The New York Times described NED in the following terms:
The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries, including China.
Those are among the more benign American efforts to intervene in the domestic politics of nations around the globe, activities that have been revealed in declassified documents, memoirs and records of Congressional hearings.
In 2016, anti-censorship activist Slim Amamou, who was briefly a minister in the transitional government of Tunisia in 2011, said Maher (who Amamou had previously met) was “probably a CIA agent,” pointing to her frequent visits to Tunisia in the year that followed the toppling of the nation’s government during the Arab Spring. Maher disputed the suggestion, accusing Amamou of trying to defame her. As of 2024, Amamou’s tweet is still up.
Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent. She's been in Tunisia multiple times since 2011 under multiple affiliations https://t.co/HMwevSCngF
— Slim Amamou (@slim404) March 13, 2016
@krmaher you gave me the impression that you were not who you claimed to be back then
— Slim Amamou (@slim404) March 13, 2016
@slim404 that's… weird, honestly. I'm not any sort of agent. You can dislike me, but please don't defame me.
— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) March 13, 2016
Maher is also involved with some of the censorship industry’s most prominent institutions. She was Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research (DFR) lab, one of the 4 counter-disinformaton organizations that comprised the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), the group created at direction of the DHS to serve as the nexus of the government’s censorship laundering operation during the 2020 elections.
Maher also has eyebrow-raising involvement with government-funded censorship organization Meedan, coordinating with the organization on a project in 2008 to monitor elections in Lebanon:
From the June 2020 Grayzone Report:
“Maher co-founded a little-known election monitoring project focused on Lebanon’s 2008 elections called Sharek961. To create this platform, Maher and her associates partnered with an influential technology non-profit organization, Meedan, which has received millions of dollars of funding from Western foundations, large corporations like IBM, and the permanent monarchy of Qatar.
Meedan also finances the regime-change lobbying website, Bellingcat, which is considering a reliable source on Wikipedia, while journalism outlets like The Grayzone are formally blacklisted.
Sharek961 was funded by the Technology for Transparency Network, a platform for regime-change operations bankrolled by billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network and billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.”
FFO recently reported how Meedan has created some of the most sinister “Civic Listening” speech-monitoring technology, backed by $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation. According to a report from the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization on the grant funding program, Meedan views distrusting mainstream media as “misinformation,” and within the scope of their government-backed speech monitoring efforts.
Meedan’s government-funded project, Check, is a tool for snooping on private messages. Check allows users to report “misinformation” on private messaging apps back to the platform through tiplines. Incidentally, Maher serves on the Board of Directors of the Signal Foundation, developers of the Signal private messaging app — one of the apps Meedan’s tool is designed to monitor.
In its report on the NSF’s funding of censorship, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization examined Meedan’s pitch for government funding, in which the organization promised to “leverage its ‘relationships and experience’ with WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to develop approaches that proactively ‘identify and limit susceptibility to misinformation’ and ‘pseudoscientific information online.’”
Maher’s links to the censorship industry don’t end with Meedan. She also joined the board of the Center for Technology and Democracy (CDT) in April 2023. FFO reported how in September 2023, CDT published a survey of the most prominent censorship industry professionals, including members of the EIP, the Atlantic Council’s DFR lab, Common Cause, and even former DHS “disinformation czar” Nina Jancowicz. This report aimed to identify best practices and provide a blueprint for future censorship operations, amidst ongoing legal challenges and public scrutiny for the role of these organizations and individuals in censorship during and after the 2020 elections.
Maher’s criss-crossing around the government’s top cut-outs continues. In January 2024, it was announced that Maher would be the next CEO of National Public Radio (NPR), the leading taxpayer-funded media outlet in the U.S.
Though not as extensive as Maher’s foreign policy affiliations, other members of Wikimedia’s executive team have similar ties. Communications officer Anusha Alikhan worked as a communications consultant for the government-funded United Nations Population Fund, the funding of which was abruptly halted by the first Trump Administration over its alleged involvement in Chinese sterilization programs. Alikhan was also a communications director for the Knight Foundation, one of the primary private foundation funders of the censorship industry, one that continues to invest in new censorship projects. Talent officer Courtney Bass Sherizen, meanwhile, previously consulted for “a defense arm of the U.S. government” while working at Deloitte.
