Wikipedia: From Democratized Knowledge to Left-Establishment Propaganda, w/ co-Founder Larry Sanger. Plus: Joe Rogan on FBI in Jan 6 | SYSTEM UPDATE #121
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Wikipedia has long been one of the Internet's most influential sites, but the online encyclopedia's power has grown exponentially in the last several years as the result of a growing relationship with Google that, among other things, ensures that the site is automatically the most prominent when everyone uses the Google search engine to search a particular person, institution, or other entity.
As usually happens with new information tools that grow in power and influence, establishment forces began to prioritize the weaponization of WikiLeaks for their own purposes.
That is one of the reasons Google began to fund and otherwise support Wikipedia as a means of commandeering it.
And all sorts of instruments have been developed to degrade what was once one of the most promising sites on the internet into yet another weapon of propaganda for the liberal establishment.
So extreme has this degradation been that one of Wikipedia's two co-founders, Larry Sanger, the person who coined the name Wikipedia and wrote its original governing documents and philosophies more than 20 years ago, warned the world in the last several years that the site is no longer trustworthy as a source of information because it has now become little more than a propaganda arm of the liberal establishment where every article involving political controversies or political figures is blatantly slanted in favor
We'll dissect and explain exactly how this manipulation and gaming of Wikipedia is achieved.
We'll also speak with Sanger himself on what the mission of the site was supposed to be, an ideology-free online encyclopedia made more reliable than ever by the fact that it was to be both neutral and dependent upon collective human knowledge and how specifically and deliberately those defining values are now being violated.
Larry Singer confirmed for several days and we're hoping he will still appear.
We had difficulty speaking with him over the last several hours to do the last confirmation, but we're hoping he simply is offline and at the right moment will appear, but we will let you know.
We nonetheless have the reporting entirely prepared to walk you through how Wikileaks Wikipedia is being weaponized and instrumentalized in favor of liberal propaganda.
Then, Joe Rogan hosted the comedian Jim Gaffigan on his Friday night show and tried to explain to that comedian the reasons why it's clear that the U.S.
security state, especially the FBI, had at least some involvement in the events of January 6th.
In response, Gaffigan simply could not fathom that the FBI could be capable of such nefarious actions, nor could he conceive of any possible reason why they might be motivated to do these sorts of things.
We're going to break down that discussion to highlight all the evidence proving the truth of Rogan's belief and add some other reasons and motives why the FBI clearly would be motivated to engage in exactly that kind of behavior, namely turn what was intended to be a peaceful protest into a violent one and turn a protest movement into an insurrectionary movement in the United States.
and will also demonstrate how this sort of naivete about, and even support for the US security state, is now central to the banal liberal worldview, or at least the anti-Trump worldview demonstrated or highlighted by Gaffigan.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow the show on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
The episodes appear there.
Twelve hours after the first broadcast, live here on Rumble, you can rate and review the shows, which helps spread the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There is a little question that Wikipedia is one of the most influential, one of the most consequential sites on all of the internet.
It's been that way for quite some time, but as a result of its growing relationship with Google, it has become far more consequential than ever at any point in its 23-year history.
As The Verge reported in June of last year, and there you see the headline on the screen, Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation for better access to information, becoming one of the first Wikimedia Enterprise customers, and the article reports, "Google becoming one of the first Wikimedia Enterprise customers, and the article reports, "Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation to help serve up the most accurate and up-to-date information on
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, says Google is one of the first companies to buy into its commercial enterprise service.
Although you may not notice it, Google uses Wikimedia services in a number of ways.
The most obvious is within its quote, knowledge panels, which appear on the side of search result pages when you look up the people, places, or things within Google's massive database.
Wikipedia is one of the sources Google frequently uses to populate the information inside those panels.
Google also cites Wikipedia in the information panel it adds to some YouTube videos to fight misinformation and conspiracy theories, although it didn't really inform Wikimedia of its plans to do so ahead of time.
Suffice to say, if you do a search of any political figure or any political entity or any political controversy, Wikipedia is far and away the most dominant influence on what will appear at the very top in the most prominent real estate on the search engine of the Internet's most powerful company, which is Google.
Here is just one of countless examples.
We randomly chose John Brennan, the former CIA director under President Obama, where if you search John Brennan, immediately will pop up several photos that are from his Wikipedia site.
Much of the information that is populated within the Wikipedia page, including here, All comes from Wikipedia.
The very first site to appear is still struggling and fighting with these pens because it's a new feature that we have, or a new program that we're using, and for some reason I'm not very adept at it.
There you see it.
The very first entry that comes up is the Wikipedia site itself, and then here as well, in this corner here, you see automatically about, and it's basically nothing more than the first paragraph of Wikipedia's page and then a link to Wikipedia itself.
So everything about Google is designed to push you toward Wikipedia, to show you that Wikipedia is the most reliable source of information, and by doing so, it has made that site one of the most consequential ones, of ones, even though it was the case for a long time that people were somewhat skeptical about Wikipedia in the sense that people understood that you just don't cite Wikipedia in a journalistic article or in an academic paper.
Nonetheless, Google's constant featuring of it, its centering of Wikipedia, makes it so that implicitly we understand that if we do a search on Google, we're going to be relying on Wikipedia in order to shape our preliminary understanding of whatever topic it is that we're we're going to be relying on Wikipedia in order to shape our preliminary understanding of And as a result, that constantly reinforces by design.
I The notion that Wikipedia is the starting point, if not the ending point, for what we need to read to understand at least the basics about whatever topic in which we're interested.
And that in turn has made Wikipedia more powerful and more consequential than ever.
Now, we know what happens whenever there's some instrument or some platform that becomes extremely influential in terms of the flow of information in the United States or in the West, which is that establishment forces work very hard to try and commandeer it, to try and exploit it to a propaganda arm for their side.
That was what was done to the internet generally.
If you go back and read the triumphalist literature about the Internet at its advent in the mid-1990s, it was heralded as this extraordinary liberatory technology precisely because it was going to enable human beings to communicate with one another and let us organize amongst ourselves
and express political activism and political debate without having to rely upon the same corporate and state authorities, the centralized power that governs the rest of our lives.
That's what made the internet so powerful.
And yet, as a result of that, precisely for that reason, it couldn't be left alone.
It couldn't be allowed to remain a free entity because that was too threatening to establishment forces to have this instrument worldwide that allowed the flow of information to take place without them being able to control it.
And so they've worked over many years To arrive at the point that we're now at, where the internet is essentially controlled, the vast bulk of it is, by a small number of mega-corporations called Big Tech that are, according to the official position of the Commerce Committee in the Congress, classic monopolies under the antitrust law.
And yet they're way too powerful to ever permit a coalition to form, to break them up, or to prevent further integration.
So they just buy up every site.
When the communication app WhatsApp started to become very popular, especially in developing countries in the democratic world, Facebook just went and bought it, like they did with Instagram.
So now whatever censorship takes place at the highest levels of Facebook, and on Friday night we showed you that one of the key officials controlling how censorship is effectuated at Facebook was somebody who had spent previously his entire adult life at the CIA.
And there are all kinds of U.S.
security state agents embedded throughout Facebook.
So Facebook now controls not just Facebook itself, which is already gigantic enough, but also Instagram and WhatsApp by virtue of having purchased it.
And Google has done the same thing with platforms like YouTube.
And so you have the Internet controlled by a small number of corporate giants and mega giants.
And then at the same time, the U.S.
government, as we know, as we cover frequently on this show because of how important it is, Has now developed a system to control how those megacorporations make decisions about what information is and is not permitted to flow through the internet.
So that is the internet as a macrocosm, what has happened to the internet.
So Wikipedia is the microcosm view of that, which is that it has become an extremely powerful platform by design.
Google has largely made it that.
And then recognizing that power, establishment forces have seized it so that essentially the same thing that you read in the New York Times or that you read on CNN or that is and is not permitted to be said on Google and Facebook is exactly the message that is reinforced by Wikipedia over and over and over again.
And so it's important, I think, to understand how that functions And the implications of it.
Now, there have been a lot of studies that have been done for many years showing how easily gamed and manipulated Wikipedia has become and how concerted of an effort it is that has been put into place to ensure that its content is controlled by a small number of people whose ideology aligns with the liberal establishment.
So here from the journal Proficient in September of 2015, you see they have on the screen, Google still loves Wikipedia more than its own properties.
This is all about how Google is obsessed with turning Wikipedia into one of the Internet's most influential sites.
So we can read that study, quote, of all the URLs we looked at, nearly 7% of them were from Wikipedia, sometimes more than once per SERP.
Looking at it another way, Wikipedia shows up in the top 10 of the search results more than 50% of the time.
In fact, it seemed to show up in commercial queries, 7.33% of all URLs, more often than it did for the informational queries.
The bulk of the Wikipedia traffic loss appears to be driven by rankings drop, as Wikipedia's overall representation in the SERPs changes only slightly, but the site did lose many of its number one and number two ranking positions.
This prevalence of Wikipedia exceeds the level at which Google shows its own properties, especially in commercial queries where Google properties represent only 2.3% of the URLs we examine.
So going all the way back to 2015, there was a concerted effort in place by Google to ensure that Wikipedia occupied more influential real estate than even Google's own properties, such as YouTube or other Google platforms.
And we just showed you that page, the randomly selected one from John Brennan, where almost the entire first page of the search, the entire top of the page, is shaped and defined by Wikipedia.
And everything about it is designed to either send you to Wikipedia or declare that the information on Wikipedia is the authoritative information about whatever person or entity you are searching.
And that makes it an incredibly valuable weapon.
And obviously, no weapon that valuable Is going to be left alone by the establishment.
The establishment because they will not allow any valuable instrument to ever be out of control or out of their hands.
That is the fight over the flow of information on the internet is whether the internet will enable free commentary and free dissemination of information or whether it will be increasingly controlled by a small number of centralized state and corporate authorities.
That to me is the overarching war.
About how the internet, what the internet will become, because if the internet becomes this kind of totalitarian or despotic platform...
Where dissent is increasingly suppressed, where the information that's allowed to be read and heard is controlled by the U.S.
security state, by the U.S.
government, and by this tiny number of megacorporations that it controls, our society will be similarly totalitarian, or similarly despotic, because who controls the flow of information is who wields power in a society.
That is why we spend so much time focused on these questions, and Wikipedia does not get nearly enough attention In terms of the vital role that it is playing, and it got powerful, not organically, but because Google took it and made it so, to the point where they're promoting it even more aggressively than they promote their own platforms.
That's how much they understand that Wikipedia, by turning it into such a powerful entity and then controlling it, can be the most valuable propaganda arm of any other weapon.
Now, as it turns out, there is two co-founders of Wikipedia.
One is Larry Sanger, who, again, we hope to have on our show tonight.
He's not here yet, but we're still hoping that we can interview him.
And he has been warning for many years About how biased Wikipedia has become to the point of being totally unreliable.
He has been telling the public, nobody should trust Wikipedia because it's now nothing more than a propaganda arm for American liberalism or Western liberalism.
Here in the British magazine, in the British newspaper, The Independent, in July of 2021, the headline reads, nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia.
He says there's a complex game being played to make an article say what somebody wants it to say.
Here's what the article reported, quote, Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can't be always be trusted to give people the truth.
That's a huge understatement for what he's actually saying.
He's not just saying the website can't always be trusted.
He's saying it can never be trusted because it's become unreliable.
He said it can give a quote, reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.
Can you trust it to always give you the truth?
Well, it depends on what you think the truth is, says Mr. Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.
He told Lockdown TV that quote, 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 that power.
And they do exactly that.
The Wikipedia founder also said there are companies that hire paid writers and editors to go in and change articles.
Mr. Sanger cited the example of an article about U.S.
President Joe Biden and said it doesn't include information from the Republican perspective.
In other words, it's perfectly aligned with how the corporate media functions.
One of the things I've been noticing recently, and there are other people who have noticed this before I did, I've learned this from how they detected this, is that if there's a scandal or some other incriminating episode involving the Biden administration or Joe Biden in particular, the initial instinct of the corporate media is to ignore it and suppress it and just not talk about it, to maintain this closed information system.
We showed you on Thursday night when we covered the new release of these Facebook emails, the Facebook files as the House Judiciary Committee called it, detailing how the U.S.
government has been badgering and hectoring and coercing Facebook to censor during the COVID pandemic for it.
How Oliver Darcy at CNN boasted of the fact that most media outlets just simply chose to ignore The entire story.
They just didn't let their viewers know about it.
And we've walked you through before how major stories and major parts of major stories are simply unknown to liberals because the media outlets that they are trained and conditioned to trust will just simply not discuss them at all.
But occasionally when they're forced to discuss it because it's becoming too much, It will always be framed as Republicans seek to exploit Hunter Biden's legal troubles or Donald Trump's campaign once again attacks the Biden Justice Department.
It's always framed as not the story itself, not the fact that Hunter Biden's plea agreement collapsed the minute it was subjected to the slightest judicial scrutiny.
Because it was so unprecedented in terms of how it was structured and so unduly generous to Hunter Biden that the judge took one look at it and said, are you kidding?
And when she started questioning the two sides about it, the Justice Department became embarrassed about what they had offered Hunter Biden and they denied the scope was as broad as it was.
The entire deal fell apart because Biden's lawyer said, well, we were promised that it really was as broad as your Honor is asking.
So.
Something like that just can't be hidden.
So instead of reporting on that, they'll say, Republicans once again look to use Hunter Biden against Joe Biden.
That's how they frame it.
And there's never the conservative perspective included except to mock it.
And that's exactly what Larry Singer is saying is true of Wikipedia.
And I can assure you that all you have to do is go and look at a controversial person or a controversial event.
Just go read it.
And it will completely comport with the Democratic Party worldview or the worldview of MSNBC.
Every article, every article about a prominent person aligns with exactly what the liberal worldview is in a way that is much more blatant than it ever was before, ever since Google started pumping it up.
He goes on, quote, this is Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the Biden article, if you look at it has very little by way of concerns about Republicans have had about him.
So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you're not going to get it from that article, he said.
He argued that there should be at least a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal, but there's very little of that.
The Ukraine scandal being that Hunter Biden, his son, was being paid $80,000 a month to sit on the board of an energy company in Ukraine at the same time that Joe Biden, the Vice President, was charged with running Ukraine.
Can we put the text of the article back on the screen?
He goes on, quote, maybe there's some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid are not identified by name.
They actually are supposed to be identified by name and say, quote, we represent this firm if they are officially registered with some sort of Wikipedia editing firm, he said.
But they don't have to do that because there is no requirement of real names.
As I said, it is a very complex sort of game.
There are all sorts of tricks that people can play to win it, he added.
So part of it is just the fact that Wikipedia is now replete with editors who are Democrats and have a liberal ideology.
So part of it are just true believers who have overrun the site and who are their dominant editors.
And then part of it is that the liberal establishment has figured out how to game the site.
Now, before we show you some of the details, we obviously can't dissect every single technique that is used to manipulate and game Wikipedia, but we do want to delve into the specifics of how some of them take place, the most important ones take place, because they are actually representative of the broader tactics of how
The establishment in the United States is controlling the flow of information, including things like inventing the disinformation industry, the industry full of people with fake credentials who declare themselves disinformation experts, who purport to decree what is true and false in order to get what they declare to be false censored off the internet on the grounds that nobody needs false information.
But before we delve into the specific tactics, we wanted to show you a couple of examples on both sides.
People who are enemies of the establishment and people who are aligned with the establishment to see how blaringly disparate their treatment is.
So there is a page devoted to the scandal of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in Ukraine.
The title of this Article on the scandal, remember this is supposed to be an ideology-free, neutral encyclopedia, is the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory.
There is a mountain of evidence showing that Hunter Biden was paid $80,000 a month, not by Burisma executives because they were stupid, but because they were smart.
Of course they were getting something in value for the $80,000 a month, and they were getting a lot in value in the way of access to Joe Biden, who took all sorts of steps to benefit Burisma or give Burisma the impression that they were having access to the most important official in Ukraine, who happened to be Joe Biden.
And yet, according to this encyclopedia article, this evidence doesn't exist.
This is just a complete conspiracy theory.
So the very first Paragraph of this encyclopedia entry on the Biden-Ukraine quote conspiracy theory reads as follows.
The Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations.
So right away in the first sentence, they're announcing that this whole scandal is fake.
That victimizes Joe Biden.
The Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was Vice President of the United States, engaged in corrupt activities relating to his son Hunter Biden, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, as part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump-Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment.
So go back there.
So notice.
The Biden-Ukraine scandal is, according to Wikipedia, the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory.
But the Trump controversy involving Ukraine is the Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Everything is written to completely comport with the liberal worldview and the Democratic Party talking points.
It's amazing.
This is one of the most important controversies in our politics.
And this is written exactly the way that if you gave the keys to Wikipedia to the DNC, they would write it.
It would read no different.
As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump-Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and damage his chances during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The conspiracy theory alleges that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son.
U.S.
intelligence community analysts released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence Promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Biden's quote to U.S.
media organizations, U.S.
officials, and prominent U.S.
individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
Can it be more blatant than that?
Not only is it a false conspiracy theory, but it's one that the Russians were behind And was done to victimize poor President Biden and to sabotage his election chances.
Just even the tone doesn't bother to pretend.
This is the site that is being heavily financed and promoted by Google as the authoritative source of what is true and not about the world.
And it reads like it's a monologue from the Rachel Maddow Show.
Every page does.
Here is an article on the controversy, the ongoing controversy, over the origin of COVID.
And this article is entitled, The COVID-19 Lab League Theory.
And here's what this encyclopedia has to say about the hypothesis that the COVID virus emerged not as the result of natural occurrences in the animal world that had a zoonotic origin and leaped to human species, but instead appeared in Wuhan because it leaked from the lab in Wuhan that was doing exactly the kind of research on bat viruses, coronaviruses,
That made them more contagious to humans.
Quote, this is Wikipedia.
The COVID-19 lab leak theory, or lab leak hypothesis, is the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, is the result of a laboratory leak.
The theory is highly controversial.
Most scientists believe the virus spilled into human population through zoonosis, similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history.
Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats and spread to humans from infected wild animals, functioning as an intermediate host.
At the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December 2019, several candidate animal species have been identified as potential intermediate hosts.
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 existed in landing laboratory prior to the pandemic.
The idea that the virus was released from a laboratory accidentally or deliberately appeared early in the pandemic.
It gained popularity in the United States through promotion by conservative personalities in early 2020, fomenting tensions between the US and China.
Scientists and media outlets widely dismissed it as a conspiracy theory.
Let me tell you a fact, an absolute indisputable fact.
The view of the leading scientists in the U.S.
Department of Energy, as well as the FBI, is that the most likely explanation for how the COVID pandemic emerged is through the research that was being conducted, funded by the United States, being conducted in the Wuhan lab.
You would have no idea that that was true from this Wikipedia entry on one of the most important questions Of at least the last decade, which is where the COVID pandemic came from.
Every word is designed to suggest that only right-wing conspiracy theorists and liars would invest any plausibility in the possibility that the virus came from a leak of a lab and not from a naturally occurring event.
Even though we know for certain that the top virologists and epidemiologists in the world writing to Dr. Fauci at the start of the pandemic were adamant that the evidence made it almost impossible to believe that it was naturally occurring and that the evidence was overwhelming, that instead it was consistent with manipulation in a lab.
and And there's an entire scandal about whether those scientists then deliberately signed a letter they themselves didn't believe, Under the direction of Dr. Fauci, who was desperate to ensure that programs that he funded and scientists in general wasn't blamed for the pandemic.
But instead, we believe the theory that the Chinese have such filthy and primitive and unsanitary eating practices, that it came from their wet markets.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that there's definitive proof one way or the other.
Having looked at all the evidence, and we've done many shows on this, I concur with the lead scientist at the Department of Energy that the evidence is far more convincing that it came from a lab rather than naturally occurring.
So I wouldn't mind at all if the Wikipedia page reflected that debate, that uncertainty.
But it doesn't.
It sneers.
At the notion that it could have come from the Wuhan lab and insinuates that it's only right-wing liars trying to create a war with China who would possibly believe that.
And that it's been dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
It's exactly what if you ask an MSNBC personality to comment on, if you ask Joy Reid to comment on the COVID pandemic, that's exactly what she would tell you, word for word, exactly what was in this entry.
And that's true of almost every entry.
I just can't overstate how, I mean, it shocked me when I began looking at this over the last six months to a year, how blatant it has become.
Now let me show you what happens if you are an enemy of the liberal establishment.
So let's take a look at one of the prime enemies of the liberal establishment right now because he's running in the Democratic primary against Joe Biden and he's questioning the war in Ukraine and the censorship regime and of course COVID orthodoxies, pretty much the The triple derby of things that are most important for the establishment, he is a dissident on.
And he has been polling too high for their comfort.
He bears the Kennedy name.
He has access to a lot of money.
And therefore, he's one of the leading enemies of the liberal establishment.
So if you wanted to find out about RFK Jr., by going to Google, you would immediately be directed to his Wikipedia page.
And here's what you would immediately read.
There you see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The first page reads the following.
RFK Jr., Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., born January 17, 1954, also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American environmental lawyer, politician, and writer.
So they made it through one sentence without didactic and polemical slanting.
But then this is what they say in the next sentence.
He is known for promoting anti-vaccine misinformation and public health related conspiracy theories.
He is a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination in the 24th presidential election.
Since 2005, he has promoted the scientifically discredited claim.
That's from the first paragraph.
He's a purveyor of disinformation.
He's known as a liar.
and is founder and chairman of the Children's Health Defense and Anti-Vaccine Advocacy Group.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy has emerged as a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in the United States.
That's from the first paragraph.
He's a purveyor of disinformation.
He's known as a liar.
He's a conspiracy theorist.
That is the site that Google has purposely convinced Americans to believe is authoritative and to which they direct them.
So, Now, if you take a look at somebody who is a proven conspiracy theorist, but who is an ally of the liberal establishment, such as David Frum, who is one of the most dishonest purveyors of disinformation in the country.
He was George Bush's speechwriter following 9-11.
Disseminated all kinds of falsehoods, the ultimate conspiracy theory of our generation, the most destructive one, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that they were in an axis of evil with Iran and North Korea, even though they were dedicated enemies of Iran, that they were in alliance with Osama Bin Laden, suggesting that Iraq was responsible for the 9-11 attack, that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks.
We covered that on a show recently.
And by the way, I just want to confirm that we do have Larry Sanger here, which I'm delighted about, and we're going to get to him in just a second.
I just want to walk through these couple of examples.
We'll talk to him about the ways in which this manipulation is accomplished.
And then we will go back to the evidence of how it's done.
But let me just show you a couple of more of these illustrative examples.
So, David Frum is an actual conspiracy theorist, whose conspiracy theories and lies have resulted in the death of at least a million people.
You would expect, right, that if Wikipedia is willing to take the strong stance like they do with RFK Jr.
and call a conspiracy theorist a liar, a conspiracy theorist and a liar in the first paragraph of all people, you would expect to find that in David Frum's Wikipedia page.
And yet the term conspiracy theory does not appear in David Frum's Wikipedia page.
Because David Frum is an ally of the liberal establishment and one of the most vocal opponents of Donald Trump.
It just doesn't appear, except for one sentence that mentions that David Frum opposed conspiracy theories being spread about President Obama.
So the only mention of a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy theorist in David Frum's entire lengthy Wikipedia page is to mention or cast or depict him as an opponent of them.
So here you see the beginning part of his Wikipedia page.
Imagine the impression, the difference in impression that these deliberately create as opposed to the RFK Jr.
one.
David Frum, David Jeffrey Frum, born June 1960, is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor.
In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency, written by a former member of the administration.
He has taken credit for the famous phrase, Axis of Evil, in Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address.
Notice, not a critique about that phrase.
It depicts Frum as this historic neutral figure, neutrally describing What he did in his career.
In 2009, Frum denounced various anti-Obama conspiracy theories as quote wild accusations and paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps.
Frum supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Again, no mention of the conspiracy theories behind that war that justified the war, that ushered it in, that he helped spread.
Just a neutral assertion that he supported the invasion of Iraq.
He helped write George W. Bush's famous Acts of Evil speech to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
From as a supporter of Israel, he opposed President Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal.
Let's take a look at one more example.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who is the current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who probably did more than any single American to convince Americans of the outright lie, the classic conspiracy theory, that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Osama bin Laden when he was a reporter at The New Yorker.
And that was a vital lie to convince Americans of because after 9-11, Americans were willing to support a war if they were convinced they were going to war against the people who perpetrated this horrific attack on American soil.
Even if they had convinced Americans Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or biological weapons, which David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg both attempted to do, That would be insufficient to generate the support necessary without misleading Americans into believing that Saddam Hussein had an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.
It was Jeffrey Goldberg who took the lead in spreading that lie, that disinformation, that conspiracy theory.
And if you look at his Wikipedia page, there is a mention that that theory has been debunked because it quotes my saying so.
But it's way buried down in the Wikipedia page.
I mean, if you were not willing to spend 20 minutes reading Jeffrey Goldberg's Wikipedia page and just want to find out quickly who he is, and you read the first section, you would think he's a journalist of great stature.
There's no hint of criticism of him in the first passage of his Wikipedia page, let alone the heaping of invective the way you find with R.F.K.
Jr.
and other enemies of the illiberal establishment.
Jeffrey Goldberg, Jeffrey Mark Goldberg, born September 22, 1965, is an American journalist and the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Magazine.
During his nine years at The Atlantic, prior to becoming editor, Goldberg became known for his coverage of foreign affairs.
How august!
Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, called Goldberg, quote, the most influential journalist blogger on matters related to Israel.
And David Rothkopf, former editor and CEO of the FP Group, called him, quote, one of the most incisive, respected foreign policy journalists around.
He has been described by critics as a liberal, a Zionist, and a critic of Israel.
The New York Times reported that he, quote, shaped the Atlantic's endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, only the third endorsement in the magazine's 160-year history.
Now, you have to go very far down Goldberg's Wikipedia page, I mean near the bottom, to find one of the only criticisms of him.
In 2002, Goldberg's The Great Terror, published in the New Yorker, argued that the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein was significant, discussing the possible connections between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
The Saddam Al-Qaeda conspiracy theory has been debunked.
It also discussed the Iraqi nuclear program, averring that there was, quote, some debate among arms control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities, but there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, We'll have them soon.
There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons.
Glenn Greenwald called Goldberg, quote, one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, saying Goldberg had, quote, compiled a record of humiliating falsehood dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller's both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact.
In his 2008 article in Slate titled, quote, How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
Goldberg explained why he initially supported the Iraq War and wrote that he, quote, didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be.
I mean, in comparison to what Jeffrey Goldberg said and did, I mean, here's just one article that actually won magazine awards at the time.
From March of 2002, so shortly after the 9-11 attack, when his friend David Frum Was having George Bush accuse Iraq of being behind the anthrax attack and being in league with Al Qaeda and being in an alliance with Iran and North Korea.
Here you see Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, arguably the most influential journal for American liberals.
And obviously the support of American liberals were vital to get that war started so that Democratic senators like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden could support it.
And they succeeded in doing that at the time of the Iraq War.
And six months later, 70% of Americans, 70% believe the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda.
And it was Jeffrey Goldberg who did more than any other journalist to ensure that they did.
Here you see in March of 2002 his now notorious article The Great Terror in Northern Iraq.
There is new evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocidal war on the Kurds and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.
Now, David Frum doesn't have, even at the end of the article the way Goldberg does, any mention that he ever spread disinformation.
Even though throughout RFK's entry and the entry on the lab leak theory and the scandal involving Joe Biden in Ukraine, it instantly denounces it as a debunked conspiracy theory full of lies.
David Frum has no criticisms in his because he is an ally of the establishment, not an enemy of it.
Let's just watch a little bit of the speech that he boasted of having written, the words that he put into George W. Bush's mouth, full of conspiracy theories and lies that led to infinitely more deaths and infinitely more destruction than anything you could accuse RFK Jr.
of having done.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.
The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children.
Now, George W. Bush as well, if you looked at his entry, has some criticisms again in it But nowhere near anything of the kind that enemies of the American establishment do or the way that they have all but decreed crucial scandals involving Joe Biden to be absolute lies.
Let me tell you one more example before we talk to Larry.
This is the news site The Gray Zone, which is devoted to critiquing the U.S.
security state and to America's wars.
And it does a lot of reporting that is controversial for sure.
But oftentimes they are the ones opposing the lies and conspiracy theories spread by the establishment.
People like David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg.
Just take a look at what this has been done to this page.
Tell me if this sounds anything like an encyclopedia as opposed to...
a Democratic National Committee propaganda alarm.
Quote, "The Gray Zone is an America far left website, news website and blog founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal.
The website initially founded as the Gray Zone Project was affiliated with Alternet before becoming independent in early 2018.
A fringe website, it is known for misleading reporting and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.
The Grey Zone has denied human rights abuses against Uyghurs, posted conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions, and posted pro-Russia propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Grayzone writers such as Matt Klumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the permanent mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia.
This is all the first paragraph of the Grayzone's page.
The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line centered around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world.
Needless to say, opposing US foreign policy and desiring a multipolar world does not make you a pro-Kremlin editorial site.
All of this is propaganda.
Deeply ideological propaganda against a news outlet that is a harsh critic of establishment foreign policy.
The website has supported the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, publishing content denying that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians during the Syrian Civil War, and accused the OPCW of a, quote, cover-up.
The website has also denied the scope of the internment camps and alleged Uyghur genocide in China, downplaying widely reported abuses by the Chinese government against Turkish Muslims minorities, a report from the Institute for Centered Strategic Dialogue, which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets, a report from the Institute for Centered Strategic Dialogue, which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets, and organizations, stated that Grey Zone reporter Aaron He coined its name.
on matters concerning Syria among its study group, overtaking Vanessa Beely.
This is anything but an encyclopedia.
And that is the reason why our guest tonight, I'm really thrilled that we have him and we're about to talk to him, is Larry Singer, who is one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia.
He coined its name.
He wrote a lot of the governing policies that defined the mission of Wikipedia, what its values were supposed to be.
And he has become one of its most prominent and obviously knowledgeable critics on the grounds that it has become an unreliable propaganda site in favor of one of the two political parties and the liberal ideology.
We're excited to talk to him because he obviously understands his site as well as anybody and has been incredibly honest about announcing what was, along with Jimmy Wales, his creation.
And so we're delighted to welcome Larry to our show.
Good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Yep, Glenn, it's good to meet you finally and come on your program.
Absolutely.
We're thrilled to have you.
So let me begin kind of at the start of Wikipedia.
Obviously, 23 years or so is a long time.
25 years is a long time.
A lot of people have trouble remembering sometimes, you know, the year prior.
I know sometimes I do.
So let's put this into historical context and talk about, since you were there, how Wikipedia was created and what the intent
Well, I arrived in California with the assignment to basically start a free encyclopedia for BOMIS.com, which was the website, the company that Jimmy Wales was the CEO of.
And initially, It was going to be called Newpedia, and we worked on a very carefully, you know, academically edited encyclopedia for the first year.
And it was going very slowly, and so I cast around for different ideas about how to speed up the pace of production, essentially.
And, well, a friend of mine told me about wikis, and I thought that it would be
Potentially a good idea, if wikis actually work the way that he said that they did, to create a wiki encyclopedia where anyone could go to any page on the site and even start new pages and just edit other people's work willy-nilly without any controls other than other people editing their work.
Essentially that's how a wiki works.
At least that's how it worked in the beginning.
Now there are a lot more controls.
But in the beginning the aim was to create a really big open source, well the word is actually open content, so it's like Open source software, but it's open content.
So it's free.
Anyone can use it.
Anyone can fork it just like open source software.
And something that would be a free resource to basically
Help enlighten the world, essentially, or at least give—maybe that's a little bit too strong—give some knowledge to the world, especially people who can't afford what we thought at the time, you know, was the paragon of an encyclopedia, was a set of encyclopedias on a bookshelf, or at least something that would, you know, cost a lot of money.
So that was the idea.
And initially it was supposed to be neutral.
That was like one of the most important features of a credible encyclopedia, to my mind at least, was that you shouldn't be able to tell whether an article was written by a Democrat or a Republican.
Generally speaking, you should present the information that a person would need in order to make up his own mind about issues of controversy, of any sorts of controversy, but unfortunately it didn't work out that way.
Obviously there has been this concern that Wikipedia, because it's created without a lot of controls and because it is something that anyone can contribute to, even people without credentials as sort of establishment circles understand that term, that it could be replete with errors and mistakes and the like.
But this idea of it being ideology free or nonpartisan or not connected to any particular faction, That seemed to be, at least to me, something that was at least as an aspiration maintained in the beginning part of the site.
And your criticism of the site began pretty early.
I think as early as 2004, 2005, 2006.
Talk about kind of the process of that.
Like when did you first start detecting that something had gone awry and what was it that you were getting concerned by?
I wasn't really so much concerned about the neutrality problem in 2004 and 2005 because in the first You're right.
The first four or five years of the website, it was pretty unusual.
You know, you could actually, it would be the only place online where you could find an article that was really meaty, in some cases at least, that actually tried to explain both sides of issues.
And it was pretty unusual in that way.
The problem that I saw with the project at that time was, ironically enough, that there was not enough respect for expertise that, The community had sort of closed itself off from the
I don't want to say the prerogatives, it's the wrong word, but they just didn't have any respect when an expert on any subject, really, would show up.
And if there were already people there who had, like, pull within the community that had their own axe to grind, it wouldn't matter what sort of You know, training, what sort of knowledge a person had on a topic, they would be essentially shut down.
That sort of thing was already happening.
But the problems really, they have sort of It's changed over time.
What used to be kind of anti-establishment, even back then, between 2005 and 2000, I want to say like 12 or so, there was this very definite shift to Wikipedia becoming essentially an establishment mouthpiece, which is amazing.
I never would have guessed that back in 2001.
Yeah, I mean there's so many things about which that's true, that things that were once defined by an anti-establishment ethos have become incredibly pro-establishment, and I have to say...
You know, maybe this is natural, but as somebody who's long had a Wikipedia page about myself, I've always seen some things in there that were a little tenuous, maybe a little bit factually imperfect, but it seemed for a long time like there was generally an effort made to more or less get the facts right about what was included in my page.
And I would say I really started noticing things gone completely awry when I really started to have what was perceived to be a breach with the political faction with which I had long been associated, at least in the public mind, which was kind of American liberalism, even the American lab, surrounding my skepticism toward Russiagate, my disagreement with how Donald Trump was being characterized, this kind of notion that he was this unprecedented evil and that everything and anything was justified in the name of stopping him.
And I kind of became an opponent of the liberal establishment and its orthodoxies and tactics.
And what I began to notice was that things that were on my Wikipedia page for over a decade with no change, things about events in my life from 10, 20, 30 years ago that had never been altered, suddenly every sentence became a war to try and insert negative insinuations suddenly every sentence became a war to try and insert negative insinuations or all kinds
All sorts of incredibly tentative characteristics and descriptions about my work that were designed to be negative to the point where my entire page became an ideological war.
Because of the fact that my perceived political place in the ecosystem had shifted and I then began looking more into how Wikipedia functions and saw that some of these pages are written, I mean, we went through a couple of them only and you can find, you know, thousands of examples where it doesn't even seem like they're pretending anymore, trying to pretend To any neutrality.
I'm just wondering, like, when did you start noticing that it was that extreme?
And if you could talk about some of the ways that that is accomplished.
Okay, well, it's very gradual.
It's really, really hard to put a particular date on it.
I first noticed that it was taking a really over-the-top biased point of view on When it shifted from the neutral point of view to a, I guess I would call it a scientistic point of view, on any sort of controversial issues in science, the establishment view on that topic was pushed very heavily.
That happened like in, I don't know, 2006, 2008.
So the global warming articles and articles about certain drugs and whatnot would have been changed back then.
And then I started noticing around 2010 to 2015 that articles on Eastern medicine, holistic medicine, which I'm not a big fan of or anything, but they were so obviously biased using, as you've noticed in your excellent
monologue opening, that they would use these dismissive epithets, you know, about these ancient traditions that, you know, even though I disagree with them, if I were writing an encyclopedia article, obviously you wouldn't do that.
There'd be a separate section maybe about, you know, Western reception of these ideas and whatnot.
Anyway, and then I think it really got over the top in the teens, like between 2013 and 2018.
2013 and 2018.
By the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now.
And it's amazing.
No encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.
I mean, that's saying something.
I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book I'm not mentioning my favorite topics in presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do.
But this is something else.
This is entirely different.
It's over the top.
Yeah, you know, I think one of the reasons why, at least to me, you know, I sometimes, like for me, when I was putting this show together, I was talking to my team, you know, I was kind of saying, like, on some level, it seems like you could just read these pages, you know, just like read the page about how they talk about the Ukraine and Biden scandal, which
Obviously people can disagree on in terms of what the evidence demonstrates, but to just simply declare outright at the start that it's replete with lies, it's a conspiracy theory, it's only designed to undermine Joe Biden or especially the debate over the COVID pandemic, which simply takes the side of the establishment and Dr. Fauci in a way that not even
They would express with such certainty in terms of the truth about what we know about COVID's origins, that that would almost be sufficient because I grew up as somebody who in a school would look to encyclopedias, you know, the pre-internet encyclopedias, and the difference in tone is so obvious.
And one of the hypotheses that I have, and I'm wondering what you think about this, is I was comparing earlier the trajectory of Wikipedia to a lot of the trends in corporate media.
And to me, what seems to be the case is that in a lot of ways, the emergence of Donald Trump kind of changed everything.
As you say, it was really gradual.
It was, you can go back before that, when kind of the Tea Party movement was emerging in the ears of Obama and people started getting a lot more polarized.
But to me, it seems like what ended up happening was the liberal establishment narrative was that Donald Trump was such a once-in-a-lifetime unprecedented menace That there's no longer anything that can exist independent of ideology and political viewpoints.
That even truth has to be subservient to the more important cause of attacking Donald Trump and the movement that formed around him.
And a lot of the conventions of journalism have been completely cast aside within a very short period of time.
The idea that you don't editorialize as part of narrative.
The argument is really now that if you don't editorialize constantly and from the start, you're failing in your job as a journalist.
That journalism requires you to constantly describe Trump as an authoritarian and Biden as a decent man, otherwise you're not telling the truth.
And it seems like A very similar thing has happened in Wikipedia, which is supposed to be an encyclopedia devoted to truth, that the premise seems to be that you don't have truth anymore independent of ideological outlook.
Well, I think you've hit it on the nose.
That doesn't really explain, that describes what the problem is.
In other words, they take their cues, so it definitely explains it at one level, right?
That the rank-and-file Wikipedians, they take their cues not from, you know, Wikipedia's original neutrality policy or anything like that.
They don't care about that at all.
They take their cues from basically CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times and whatever those outlets feel comfortable saying.
And one also has to remember that they have declared like 80% of the major It's in their policy at this point.
on the right to be unreliable officially.
It's in their policy at this point.
A lot of people don't realize that, but it's true.
And that really, really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say.
But the deeper explanation I think is, and I guess I'm going to offer a conspiracy theory now, that essentially I think that the left it's not a big conspiracy everybody knows and believes this, right?
The left very, very deliberately seeks out to take control Except it isn't just the left.
We're learning that now, aren't we?
This grey zone example that you point out.
No, it's the establishment.
And they have their own agenda.
I'm not going to try to offer any opinions because it's not something that I study as to how they bring that about.
But it's clear that between 2005 and 2015, it was on their radar.
Wikipedia moved on to the establishment's radar.
And of course, we do have evidence that the CIA, even as early as, I think, was it Virgil Griffiths discovered this in 2008, I think, something like that, that the CIA and the FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia.
And you think they stopped doing that back then?
No.
And not just them, right?
We know that intelligence now, a great part of intelligence is, and Information warfare is conducted online, and where if not on websites like Wikipedia, right?
So that they pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they're already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then, you know, push what they want to say within With their own people.
So that's my take on that.
Yeah, I think the point you raised is a crucial one.
It's one I emphasize so often, which is I really do believe now that the most relevant metric for understanding the world, and it's certainly how people are treated, is not so much left versus right, but anti-establishment versus subservient to the establishment.
And ultimately, there are people who are more conservative, who are very much aligned with establishment politics.
David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg, the two examples we used, didn't get more liberal over the years.
They just became useful to the establishment in a way that some people on the left like Grayzone.
And I would put even RFK Jr., who's harder to find ideologically, but there's certainly a lot of left-wing views that he has.
He's running to Biden's left on the question of whether we should be aggressive toward China, certainly whether we should be supporting the CIA and the military industrial complex and things like Ukraine.
And more than anything, though, he's considered an enemy of the establishment.
Let me just ask you about, as one of the last questions, the role of Google in all of this.
I mean, I think this is kind of the key.
And I wonder, for me, it's kind of a chicken and egg question.
I wonder if you can shed some light on it.
Obviously, Google is a major part of why Wikipedia has grown significantly in terms of its impact Is it that Google saw the potential of Wikipedia to become this kind of authoritative, uber-authoritative source on the internet and decided to kind of grab it, pump it up in order to be able to influence it?
Or was Wikipedia already growing into becoming that?
And so Google decided, well, let's kind of ride with it and see if we can kind of redirect it and help control it.
Look, I am not an expert on the inner workings of Google, or for that matter, Wikipedia, after I left.
So what you say is very plausible.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were true.
But to be honest, I don't know.
What I do know is that Google has donated millions of dollars to to Wikipedia over the years.
Google has, much more importantly, pushed Wikipedia articles.
And insofar as people who are in Google or advising Google, investing in Google, want the public to believe certain things.
As long as Wikipedia is saying those things, then those articles are going to tend to be pushed to the top.
So what we need to do, I have to get this in, what we need to do is to reach into the long tail of all the other encyclopedias.
There are other encyclopedias, you know.
There are.
There's a lot.
Can you talk about them?
I know you were involved with one and are involved with one.
There are a couple of alternatives that have a different model.
Can you just talk people through that?
A few.
A good, explicitly neutral encyclopedia of American politics is called Ballotpedia.
It's really good.
And Ballotpedia articles, they don't really Ranked very highly on Google, in my experience.
Let's see.
Although they can, they can.
Let's see, what else?
Well, on the right there is Conservapedia, and on the left there is, what, Rational Wiki?
That's really bad, but anyway, that's an example.
There's a lot of others, anyway, besides Wikipedia.
And well, if you really want to see them and search all of them at once, I would say go to encyclosearch.org or encycloreader.org.
And what my organization now is doing is collecting free encyclopedia articles from as many sources as we can.
It takes time to set up new encyclopedias to be crawled or at least to be gradually absorbed, which is what we do.
But we have 35 and growing encyclopedias in the system.
And we are creating an open and free database and network of encyclopedias, essentially.
Wikipedia is part of it.
So necessarily it's going to be greater than Wikipedia because it's going to include Wikipedia, but a lot more.
If you want to have an experience of comparing real, relatively old-fashioned encyclopedias with really scientific, So biased as to be twisted, Wikipedia articles, I think that would be a good place to start, Encycloreader and Encyclosearch.
And by the way, the software that we are using to aggregate these articles is all open source.
You can spin up your own aggregator and And all of the articles are digitally signed, which means that we can prove if somebody has tampered with them, essentially.
We're trying to strike a blow against censorship and control of information by simply making it easier to find all the other encyclopedias that are out there.
And also, well, we've got very soon, like within a couple of weeks, there will be a WordPress plugin where people can push articles that they write on their own blogs, so all across the web, to the encyclosphere, and then And it will appear in, I think, we're up to four different aggregators at this point.
Well, we will definitely continue to follow the work that you're doing.
I mean, of course, the problem is that Google controls, with such a stranglehold, the most valuable real estate on the Internet.
And sometimes, of course, that is the great challenge is kind of wrestling control of the full information away from these big tech companies.
But if there's anything for which I have solidarity and empathy, it's somebody who is a co-founder of an organization who thinks they're creating something in order to advance certain values and then looks at what their creation has become and sees it being the exact opposite of what they think.
They're creating and I know from experience that it's sometimes difficult to announce something of which you're the co-founder because it's part of your legacy.
You want it to be something that you're proud of.
You want it to be something that made a positive contribution in the world and I think the fact that you've been willing to step up for so long and be a critic of this thing that you played such a vital role in creating requires a lot of courage and it's become extremely important that you're doing that.
I know I've learned a lot from your critiques.
It's kind of attracted my attention to this topic.
And I really appreciate your doing that.
I appreciate your taking the time to come on and talk to us as well.
Well, thanks for everything that you've done, Glenn.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Have a great evening.
So there you have them.
I mean, as I was saying, I certainly empathize with somebody who is the co-founder of an entity that they become horrified by, and particularly because it ends up being a degradation, a vandalization of the exact defining values they thought they were advancing when they created that entity.
Obviously, that's what happened to me at The Intercept.
And I think the fact that you have one of two co-founders of Wikipedia Denouncing the site for exactly what it has become in such direct and unflinching terms as he's doing Creates the space necessary to give this critique credibility.
So it doesn't just seem like the standard whining about things being biased so before we had We were as I said, we weren't sure we were gonna have him on and then once he came on I wanted to Get him on and not make him wait, but we do have some
Other evidence that I think is incredibly important about exactly how this bias is perpetrated, and I think it's very important to take a look at it instead of just observing the results, to take a look at what's underneath the hood and see how specifically this is done.
So let's go back to this tweet here where somebody just as a kind of illustration compiled The section that is for far left politicians in the US versus the ones who are far right.
Because so much of this is accomplished through that kind of language that Larry Sanger was describing, where the language becomes sneering.
It is all intended to make you very skeptical about something, what you call a conspiracy theorist versus what you call somebody who has been involved in controversies.
All of that is deliberately cultivated to foster a particular viewpoint.
And so the same is true when you call somebody far-right versus far-left.
So if you look at who Wikipedia calls far-right and far-left, it's not really surprising that here's the entire list of far-left politicians in the United States.
There are a grand total of four of them, the American Maoist group, the American Trotskyites, Shama Sawant who is a self-identified socialist who was on the City Council in Seattle and then Sam Webb who is a self-identified communist.
Those are the far-left politicians.
Far-right politicians, here they all are.
You have just enormous numbers, so this is obviously part of what I was suggesting earlier, is that you just kind of call people whatever you want to call them based on who you want to disparage.
You have former members of the Senate, you have current members of the Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, you have Joe Kent, who was a member of the military who got very disillusioned because his wife was killed in the war in Syria.
He saw all kinds of horrible things in Iraq where he was serving.
He became an anti-war populist, so he gets labeled far-right.
He was attached to the Donald Trump movement.
And so Madison Cawthorn, who was a former member of the Congress.
So these are just how you play with word games, and the fact that there's a huge pile of people who get labeled far right, whereas very few people, almost nobody, gets labeled far left, unless they call themselves that, is very illustrative of the kind of bias that's going on here.
Sanger alluded to this, but this is really the key for how everything is done.
The way this bias is accomplished is largely through the game playing that they do with regard to who or what is and is not considered to be a reliable source of information.
If something is deemed to be a reliable source of information, editors can justify the inclusion of almost anything as long as those entities have said it.
But if something is defined outside the scope of what a reliable source is, then no matter what they report, no matter what they say, it cannot be used to edit a Wikipedia page.
And this is, of course, very similar to the fraudulent disinformation industry, the way in which this entire new industry has sprouted out of nowhere.
Funded by the same small handful of neoliberal billionaires like Pierre Omidyar and George Soros.
We've gone through this disinformation industry several times.
And the core premise of it is that if you can identify people who are qualified to identify disinformation, so-called disinformation experts, there's no field of discipline that gives people, confers degrees in disinformation.
It's just a made up title.
where you say that these are the people who are somehow trained to identify disinformation, then whatever they call disinformation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, can describe as being a lie or a conspiracy theory or a product of disinformation because these are the people who have been deemed, based can describe as being a lie or a conspiracy theory or a product of disinformation because these are the people
And obviously, whoever is conferred with that title wields a great amount of power and you make sure that the only people to whom you give that title are people who spout establishment dogma and serve establishment interests, which is, of course, exactly what they've done.
That's why that industry is funded in that way.
That is the basis of censorship.
So if you say to Facebook or the U.S. government, what justifies you from demanding this information be suppressed, They'll say, well, this has been determined to be disinformation by these disinformation experts.
And so everything is about who gets that title.
And exactly the same is true for the game that Wikipedia is playing.
Where they've created definitions for who is and is not a so-called reliable source that in turn lets them play games with whatever they want to play games with by simply saying, well, these are the reliable sources and this is what they say.
Oh, you have somebody reporting the opposite?
Sorry, they're not a reliable source.
They can't be used.
So how reliable source is defined is crucial, though it's a linchpin to this entire game, to this entire manipulative effort.
And unsurprisingly, they essentially define reliable sources to be the corporate media, large media corporations.
It's an authoritarian mindset.
If you have a gigantic media corporation, that's who's reliable.
Anybody who's independent, anybody who is working on their own or with a small team or with an entity that is not yet deemed credible, doesn't matter what those people report.
It's basically non-existent.
It cannot be trusted inherently because of who they are.
So just take a look here.
You see the section.
I mean, you can go and read it for yourself, how they define it.
It's Wikipedia Reliable Sources, and they describe here exactly what they do to deem something a reliable source or not.
So this is what a couple of the key sections read.
Quote, anyone can create a personal web blog or webpage or publish their own book and claim to be an expert in a certain field.
For that reason, self-published sources are largely not acceptable.
Self-published books and newsletters, personal pages on social networking sites, tweets, and posts on internet forums are all examples of self-published media.
Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable independent publications, but never use self-published sources as independent sources about other living people, even if the author is an expert, well-known professional researcher or writer.
That means if you want to have an encyclopedia entry about Joe Biden, you can only use the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN, but you can't use independent media.
Such as myself, even though I have compiled every major journalism award in the West, I could not be deemed a reliable source for purposes of Wikipedia because, according to them, I self-publish.
Even though I have a large team of editors and fact-checkers, it doesn't make a difference.
If you don't work for a media corporation, you're inherently excluded from use as a source for reporting on living people.
That only can be large media corporations that do that.
They go on.
The reliability of a source depends on context.
Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content.
In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication.
So in other words, if you have gigantic newsrooms and you're a billion-dollar corporation or a multi-billion-dollar corporation, inherently you're going to be more reliable.
than somebody who has forged a more independent path.
How does that make any sense?
Especially when you look at the history of corporate media in the United States.
These are the people who lied the country into the Vietnam War, through the Gulf of Tonkin propaganda, lied the country into the Iraq War, told lies about the anthrax attacks, blaming Iraq for it at exactly the moment the country was trying to go to war with Iraq, called the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation,
invented the entire concept of Russiagate from the bowels of the CIA and FBI and then spent years disseminating what Robert Mueller, after investigating with 18 months in an unlimited budget, said could not be established, gave themselves Pulitzer's for doing it.
On some level, it should almost be the bigger the media corporation, the less trustworthy they are.
That's what you would do if you were trying to find truth.
But if you're trying to propagandize the public, of course you want to exclude anyone but mainstream media outlets, because those are gigantic corporations that, of course, have an interest in maintaining establishment dogma.
And that's exactly what they do.
And that's why Wikipedia aligns so closely to it.
It goes on, quote, news sources often contain both factual content and opinion content.
News reporting from well-established news outlets is generally considered to be reliable for statements of fact, though even the most reputable reporting sometimes contains errors.
News reporting from less established outlets is generally considered less reliable for statements of fact.
So by less established, they mean smaller, newer, less reliant on corporate resources.
Quote, most newspapers also reprint items from news agencies such as Reuters, Interfax, AFP, United Press, International, or the AP, which are generally responsible for accuracy.
The agency should be cited in addition to the newspaper that reprinted it.
Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts or with no editorial oversight.
A poor reputation among whom?
What does that mean, a poor reputation?
Who determines the reputation of a site?
If you ask people about Daily Caller and you ask the New York Times or CNN about it, you're going to get a much different perception of its reputation than if you ask conservative politicians or conservative sites about the Daily Caller.
Daily Caller does some of the best reporting on a lot of events in Washington, things on which nobody else reports.
But they haven't been around for nearly as long as, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post.
They're not as big as those outlets.
Their reputation is much poorer, if you ask the people designated by liberal institutions to be experts.
And so all of this is, by design, incredibly subjective.
Quote, such sources include websites and publications.
This is the list of sources that are deemed unreliable.
Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist.
Again, widely acknowledged by whom is extremist.
That are promotional in nature or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions.
Questionable sources are generally unsuitable for citing contentious claims about third parties, which include claims against institutions, persons living or dead, as well as more ill-defined entities.
The proper uses of a questionable source are very limited.
Anyone can create a personal webpage or publish their own book and claim to be an expert in a certain field For that reason, self-published sources are largely not acceptable.
I think we already went over that.
So, this is crucial to the entire game that is being used on Wikipedia to produce the kind of articles we reviewed earlier.
Obviously, if you get to define what a credible source is, just like if you get to define who a disinformation expert is, you control the entire determination of truth.
And that's how they're gaming this site.
Now, there are a lot of other ways this site is being gamed.
Lots of liberal activist groups now see editing on Wikipedia as a form of activism, heroism, Here is a student newspaper that's leftist, Student Life, and the headline is calling on all activist scholars.
Let's edit Wikipedia.
A lot of people on the left and the liberal establishment now see editing Wikipedia as a form of social activism.
Because they get to shape this incredibly influential site that has been deemed authoritative by Google to align with their own ideological perspective.
And it's working, as we showed you.
Here's another.
Editing as activism, fighting bias and misinformation on Wikipedia.
Editing as activism.
This is from Melissa Nelson, a woman who identifies as a writer, an educator, an archivist.
But that is the way in which That is the way in which this is being defined, editing Wikipedia as a form of political activism.
Oh, is she from McGill University?
Is that what you're saying?
I'm just having somebody talk in my ear.
I think that's what...so she's with McGill University.
Now, there have been studies about Wikipedia that have been very revealing of how the whole site is being gamed.
One was from Purdue University in 2017, the title of which is, Results of Wikipedia Study May Surprise.
And it reads, quote, The mysterious world of Wikipedia isn't such a mystery anymore to a pair of researchers who conducted a 10-year study on the free online encyclopedia.
Mate, one of the researchers, says that the top 1% of writers, editors on Wikipedia create about 80% of the content.
So it's in the hands of a tiny number of people.
That ratio, he said, was shown in their study to be consistent.
Maté, director of the Purdue Stata Storytelling Network, and Britt have co-authored a new book on their work, the book titled Structural Differentiation in Social Media.
Advocacy, Entropy, and the 1% Effect reinterprets the idea that Wikipedia is a commons-based peer production site.
Quote, it is built by peers, but some peers are more equal than others, at least in terms of effort.
The book presents some interesting findings about the ways in which a new elite has emerged in the world of communication and about the ways in which social media groups evolve, Maté says.
Propocracy, the idea that crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia aren't decentralized and spontaneous ventures, is orchestrated by an organizational system that combines a stable power hierarchy with individual mobility.
Thank you.
And there have been all kinds of stories about how one or two or three editors that seem like they're operated by committee even though they use the same name because they edit all day and night in order to manipulate content to adhere to liberal content seem to be some sort of committee.
Now, there have been reports on how major entities now hire Groups and firms that are experts in manipulating Wikipedia content.
Here from the Huffington Post of 2019 was a report on how Facebook, Axios, the news site, and NBC all paid this one guy to whitewash their Wikipedia pages.
Quote, Axios may not have expressed his worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, A former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com, who's now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com to do damage control.
Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page, mostly with benign, if largely flattering, stats about Axios' accomplishments.
Several NBC employees, including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and NBC chairman Andy Lack, Benefited from Sussman's intervention, too.
In one proposed edit, Sussman attempted to argue that on NBC News' Wikipedia page, the mention of criticism directed at NBC over its handling of Matt Lauer constituted a violation of Wikipedia's rules since, quote, it does not summarize the opposing point of view.
Facebook's PR agency paid Sussman to tweak Facebook's CEO Sheryl Sandberg's page.
He also spent over a year lobbying Wikipedia editors to create a page for Facebook's global head of PR, Karen Marooney, despite being repeatedly turned down over her lack of notability.
But Sussman, to many editors' dismay, is indefatigable, and he eventually triumphed.
So, there you see just professionals gaming the system on behalf of liberal corporations and liberal news outlets to make their entries more favorable.
And as I said, I saw this first-hand with my own page.
There's nothing like having first-hand knowledge to make you understand how something works.
Where for a decade my Wikipedia page was very stable and almost entirely positive because I was perceived as being an ally of left liberal politics and left liberal political culture and when this perceived breach happened in 2016 largely over Russiagate and then Donald Trump.
You could watch in real time every one of my sections and every sentence and every new section that got added, transforming it to something derogatory.
And it continues to happen to this very day, where entries that have been on the site, on my page, for over a decade, unchanged, are now constantly being changed with the addition of new words, with slanted perspectives, always negative, as a result of my perceived new position in the political ecosystem.
Now one of the victims of this, The Gray Zone, whose Wikipedia page that's a joke...
We showed you earlier, did some investigation about exactly how the Wikipedia system is being manipulated and then covered some very interesting facts that we checked and they were largely true.
And the title of the article is Wikipedia, the corrupt encyclopedia.
Wikipedia formally censors the gray zone as regime change advocates monopolize editing.
And you heard Larry Sanger before saying that the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI had been caught many times editing pages that are of direct interest to the U.S.
security state about foreign enemies, about wars, about various policies they support or oppose.
And obviously, they're going to be doing that to the journalists and the sites that are most devoted to opposing the U.S.
security state.
That's, of course, what they do.
They have always done that.
And here's what the Grayzone investigation found, quote, Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia is censoring independent news websites by adding them to an official blacklist of taboo, quote, deprecated media outlets.
As I said before, if you say sites that are reputed to be discredited are not usable, the question becomes discredited among whom?
The gray zone is among the news websites targeted by the censorship campaign.
Others include leftist and anti-imperialist outlets like Mint Press News and the Latin American broadcaster Telesor, along with several prominent right-wing political sites including the Daily Caller.
Even more troubling is the fact that governments, intelligence agencies, and large corporations maintain significant influence over Wikipedia, editing the encyclopedia to push their agendas while carefully monitoring articles and policing new edits.
The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and Fossil Fuel Colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles.
There has been sub-coverage in alternative media, for instance, of the mysterious editor Philip Cross.
This lone user spends hours per day, virtually every day of the week, obsessively monitoring and editing articles to smear anti-war journalists and politicians.
Joining the gray zone in the Wikipedia blacklist is Mint Press News, an independent left-leaning anti-war news website, also based in the United States.
This group of centrist Wikipedia editors also deprecated The Daily Caller, a right-wing website that the editors claim publishes, quote, false or fabricated information.
At the same time, Wikipedia has given the interventionist pro-NATO blog, Bellingcat, a green light as a credible source on par with the AP.
We devoted an entire show a couple months ago.
To presenting the evidence that Bellingcat is overwhelmingly funded by Western intelligence agencies, including the parts of the United States government, the National Endowment for Democracy, that is explicitly touted as a government agency or controlled by the government that does the dirty work of the CIA, but out in the open.
But Bellingcat is listed as credible as the New York Times.
That's the way in which this manipulation works.
Quote, Wikipedia editors have also determined that the now defunct neoconservative staunchly pro-war website, the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol's old site, is a quote, generally reliable source on the same level as the AFP.
Now, in the trajectory, in the history of the United States, You cannot find a news outlet that has lied more destructively and more casually than the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic.
We recounted all the disinformation campaigns earlier that they spread that caused immense harm and damage.
And yet Wikipedia deems all of them generally reliable because of the agenda they dutifully serve.
Wikipedia is just like those corporate media outlets.
They operate in exactly the same way.
Here is a tweet from the author of that Grey Zone article, Ben Norton, in February of 2020, who says, Wikipedia is a scam.
It's a propaganda vehicle for intelligence agencies, government corporations, and PR flacks.
This extremely shady user, Philip Cross, edits all day, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., posting nonstop pro-war propaganda, including almost every edit on Max Blumenthal's page.
Max Blumenthal is one of the Grey Zones writer.
And there you see the entries on Max Blumenthal's page.
Almost all of which come, or the overwhelming, the majority of which come from one user, Philip Cross, who has obviously devoted a significant part of his life to ensuring that Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia page is intended to malign him and make sure that anyone who reads it instantly dismisses him as a source of information who has obviously devoted a significant part of his life to ensuring that Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia page is intended to malign him and make be.
Now there has been reporting on people like this Philip Cross from 5filters.org in August of 2020.
They write, quote, Philip Cross is biased and hostile editing of Wikipedia isn't very subtle.
He's banned from editing in the area of British politics, but it happened after a huge fuss was made and UK media reported on it.
Yet he's still allowed to write over 50% of Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia entries.
Kit Clarenberg, who is an anti-establishment journalist, in September of 2022 wrote, What's particularly eerie is the primary vandal of the Grey Zone news wiki entry was a user named mhawk10.
Their other most edited pages were Uyghur Genocide, Adrian Zenz, Radio Free Asia, and Max Blumenthal.
So you can see that there is an extremely concerted effort to ensure that whoever is an opponent of establishment ideology is discredited and basically disappeared from Wikipedia's pages by ensuring that they can never be used as a site,
which means anything we report on this show, despite which means anything we report on this show, despite my credentials as a journalist being infinitely greater than almost everybody who works inside the corporations of news corporations that are deemed credible, is instantly excluded.
There's nothing that I can report that can be used to provide balance to establishment dog on the Wikipedia page because I don't work for a big media corporation.
And yet the corporate media outlets that are obvious propaganda outlets are the ones deemed authoritative, and that's why almost every page perfectly reads the way it would if it were written by Joe Biden's White House team.
With no exaggeration.
The examples we showed you about the origins of COVID, about Joe Biden and Ukraine.
About David Frum, about Jeffrey Goldberg, about RFK Jr.
Totally comport to corporate media narratives, and don't even pretend to be encyclopedic at all.
It's not subtle.
It's incredibly blatant.
And yet Google pumps up this site, directs everyone to it, and implicitly announces to the world that it's authoritative, which is what makes it so vital to deconstruct and understand.
Now we had planned to, as I indicated at the top of the show, talk about a segment that Joe Rogan did with Jim Gaffigan about the FBI's role in the January 6th event and we really wanted to analyze particular Jim Gaffigan's Shock and dismay that it could even be suggested that the FBI would do something as nefarious as help turn what was intended to be a peaceful protest violent for its own reasons at the FBI.
Tomorrow, though, we're going to do reporting on two recent cases, including one, the Newburgh 4 case that I've been reporting on since it happened.
2010, that was one of the most egregious examples of what the FBI constantly did during the first war on terror and what they continue to do on the war on terror now, which is take people who they view as vulnerable because they're poor, because they're mentally unstable, because they have extremist views, and believe they're susceptible to being manipulated into joining plots
Constantly being hectored and encouraged and manipulated by experts at the FBI and how to manipulate people using very unscrupulous informants who then are manipulated, pushed, coerced into joining a terrorist plot that they never would have joined on their own.
And a judge who had presided over this Newburgh 4 case, one of the most prominent forms of domestic terrorism, who constantly from the beginning said she thought these defendants never would have joined this plot, didn't have the capability to do it without the FBI informant doing everything for them, was one example of the FBI constantly creating its own plots, funding its own plots, inventing its own plots.
That they would then congratulate themselves on breaking up by arresting the suspects.
And these people would go to prison for a long time.
The defendants in this case had sentences of 25 to 30 years.
And they weren't just put in any prison, they were put in the harshest post 9-11 prisons.
Where their communications were heavily restricted with the outside world.
Supermax prisons, just one level short of the Supermax in Florence, Colorado, where people are confined to cages 23 and a half hours a day.
And the judge ordered them released based on what she had always known to be true and what she continued to emphasize, which was that this would never have happened.
This plot never would have existed absent the FBI inventing this plot and then luring people into it for their own interests.
They've been doing that throughout the new domestic war on terror aimed at domestic extremists as they call them here in the United States.
And then there's a second case that we've done some reporting on.
There's new events, developments in it where a black anti-war leftist group has been indicted on the grounds of being Russian agents because of their opposition to the war in Ukraine by the Biden Justice Department.
And so we want to examine the question of what the U.S. security state's role is in fueling this perception of domestic extremism and how they're exploiting the fears around this, purposely exaggerating it in order to gain more power, gain more authority over our discourse.
This is how a lot of the censorship regime is being justified by claiming that right-wing extremism is the greatest threat, by anti-establishment activism is the greatest threat, and therefore the U.S. security state's powers need to be directed inward onto our own soil.
And Joe Rogan's discussion of the role the FBI clearly played in the events of January 6th Fits perfectly within the reporting we're gonna do tomorrow, and so just for the sake of time, since we're almost at nine o'clock, two-hour show tonight, we'll put that into tomorrow night's show where it fits perfectly anyway.
And as a result, that will conclude our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast version.
Each episode appears on Apple, Spotify, and all other major podcasting platforms 12 hours after its first broadcast.
Live here on Rumble and on every Tuesday and Thursday night after the conclusion of our show here on Rumble we move to our locals platform where we conduct a live interactive after show with our audience to take your questions, respond to your feedback.
That is for our subscribers only to our locals platform which you can join by clicking the join button right beneath the
