The founder of Wikipedia has issued a stark warning to the public about the site he helped create, claiming that the U.S. government has taken it over as a tool for “information warfare” against the public.
Millions of unwitting Americans use Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information on the Internet. Google and social media companies promote Wikipedia to the top of their search results and use the data posted on the site as definitive ‘facts’ when users are looking for information.
However, the data contained within Wikipedia are often generated and edited by a shadowy group of activists who seek to advance a political and social narrative.
According to Wikipedia co-founder Lawrence Mark Sanger, the CIA and other alphabet intelligence agencies are now in charge of Wikipedia and use it to manipulate public opinion.
Sanger claims the CIA and FBI have been secretly operating the site for the past 15 years.
He made the bombshell admission during an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Sanger claims that Wikipedia has become a tool of “control” in the hands of the U.S. government.
He warns that the site is now heavily controlled by the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies.
“We do have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” Sanger told Greenwald.
“Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
“Just how did we get to a point where ‘truth’ is tied to a particular ideology?” Sanger asked.
Sanger highlighted the “gradual change” he observed in Wikipedia’s content over the past several years.
He began noticing that from 2006 to 2008, articles related to controversial topics in science started to express far-left biases.
Sanger explains that scientific pages related to topics such as “global warming” and Big Pharma, shifted from science to far-left propaganda.
“Then I started noticing around 2010 to 2015 that articles on like Eastern medicine and holistic medicine … were so obviously biased,” Sanger said.
“It really got over the top … between 2013 and 2018,” he continued.
Greenwald agreed that President Trump’s rise in American politics had a huge impact on the severity of the propaganda.
They note that the “liberal establishment narrative” aimed at countering President Trump was strikingly apparent in Wikipedia’s content.
Sanger also expressed concern about the abandonment of Wikipedia’s “original neutrality policy.”
He warns that “rank and file Wikipedians” – those responsible for the bulk of editing on the site – now take cues from liberal corporate media outlets like “CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times.”
Sanger also pointed out that Wikipedia officially lists “80 percent of the major sources of news on the right to be unreliable.”
By the time of the Trump administration, Wikipedia’s bias had massively intensified, Sanger said.
Sanger claimed that “no encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.”
— Larry Sanger (@lsanger) August 2, 2023
He believed that Wikipedia became a target for weaponization between 2005 and 2015, with “information warfare … conducted online.”
Sanger claims that sites like Wikipedia play a central role in this conflict.
Instead of using Wikipedia, Sanger recommends other online encyclopedias such as Ballotpedia and Conservapedia.
However, Sanger notes that these more trustworthy Wikipedia alternatives are hidden in the search results provided by Google.
Greenwald, a longtime Democrat who previously supported the Obama administration, revealed that he’s no stranger to the “weaponization” of “new information tools.”
Greenwald describes the hijacking of Wikipedia as “the most valuable propaganda arm of any other weapon.”
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.@Wikipedia is a dominant force in the information ecosystem—largely due to how aggressively it's pushed by Google's search engine.
And controlled by a small number of contributors w/ an appalling pro-establishment bias, it has effectively been forged into a weapon of elites. pic.twitter.com/Q2hFFnDjYS
— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) August 1, 2023
Slaynews.com reports: Greenwald said he had been targeted with political attacks and weaponized propaganda due to his involvement in whistleblower Edward Snowden’s release of U.S. government secrets.
Sanger’s revelations aligned with findings from a programming student named Virgil Griffith, who first published evidence of CIA and FBI activity on Wikipedia in 2007.
According to a 2007 Reuters report, Griffith had developed a program, called Wikiscanner.
The program could trace the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles.
The Huffington Post reported in 2008 that the CIA and FBI were found to have edited numerous articles, removing incriminating information.
The CIA, for example, used its computers to remove casualty counts from the Iraq War.
The FBI, meanwhile, removed images of Guantanamo Bay and edited articles on various subjects.
Sanger concluded that intelligence agencies either paid influential individuals to advance their agendas or developed their own personnel within the intelligence community to manipulate Wikipedia content to their advantage.
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