A Wikipedia printed logo on a grass field. Photo: Moheen/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 2.0.
Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has stated that US authorities and intelligence services, such as the CIA and FBI, employ the renowned online encyclopedia as a tool in their efforts of “information warfare.”
Renowned US investigative journalist and host of the System Update podcast Glenn Greenwald delved into the issue of truth in the media in a recent conversation with Sanger and asked the Wikipedia co-founder about his opinion of the current trajectory of the global web encyclopedia.
“Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia dedicated to truth, but the premise is that there is no longer any truth independent of the ideological landscape,” Greenwald said. Sanger added that Wikipedia was initially designed with a neutral policy in mind. However, he noted the presence of efforts aiming to take “control” over this informational resource.
The Wikipedia co-founder stressed that authorities themselves often pursue specific agendas, and he pointed out that US intelligence agencies have been manipulating the online encyclopedia for over a decade.
“It is known that between 2005 and 2015 Wikipedia was on the establishment’s radar … Of course, we have evidence that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia. Do you think they stopped doing it then? No,” Sanger said.
Sanger pointed out that much of the current “information warfare” takes place on the Internet, “and where else but on websites like Wikipedia?” he said, adding that finding ways to promote “what they want to say” is part of the “Wikipedia game.”
Sanger also noted that one of the first to discover manipulation within the encyclopedia was Virgil Griffith, who revealed CIA and FBI activity began as early as 2007. Griffith developed a program that could track the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles.
PressTV also reported that with his program, Griffith discovered that the CIA used his computers to delete the Iraq war casualty count and edit hundreds of articles, including entries on former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Chinese nuclear program, and the Argentinean navy, while the FBI intervened to delete aerial and satellite images of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Expert Recommends Participation and Fight Back Within Wikipedia – Learning to Edit its Contents
Intelligence agencies “pay the most influential people to push their agendas, which they are already mostly aligned with; or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.
And this is not limited solely to the US security apparatus; similar actions are also being carried out by corporations that aim to dig up and eliminate incriminating information.
It should be noted that Wikipedia is not the only platform that has caught the attention of US intelligence and security agencies. The owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), Elon Musk, publicly disclosed a substantial trove of internal documents revealing that former executives of the social media corporation cooperated with the FBI to remove unwanted content.
One of the stories censored by the FBI on Twitter was the scandal surrounding the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the current US president, revealing incriminating emails alleging corrupt acts committed by President Biden. At the request of US authorities, this story was silenced by all available means within the platform, according to documents released by Musk.
These documents also revealed that Twitter assisted the US military in online propaganda campaigns and censorship of “anti-Ukrainian [NATO] narratives” at the request of various US state agencies.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, at the direct request of the FBI, censored information that would have been damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign.
(Sputnik) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/KZ/BLA
