Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.
“I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation,” Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. “Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That’s what makes reports of Wikipedia’s systemic bias especially troubling.”
Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that “researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias.” Cruz alleged that “bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia’s reliable sources/perennial sources list” because it describes “MSNBC and CNN as ‘generally reliable’ sources, while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a ‘blacklisted’ and ‘deprecated’ source that Wikipedia’s editors have determined ‘promotes disinformation.’”
It must not be protecting pedofiles hard enough
I think most of the world is considered left wing compared to the US.
Hell, even our “extreme right” would be more left leaning than the US left.
So yeah, any website that has international contributors, will be “left wing” from the perspective of the US.
Cruz alleged that “bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia’s reliable sources/perennial sources list” because it describes “MSNBC and CNN as ‘generally reliable’ sources, while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science.
Fox News, the one that successfully argued in court they they were for entertainment purposes only and not actual news? That Fox News?
Here’s an opinion piece about this, in case anyone is curious: https://niemanreports.org/fox-dominion-lawsuit/
Any publisher of truth exhibits strong anti-fascist bias. That’s because fascism is inherently anti-truth
Left wing bias = says objectively true things about me I don’t like.
Maybe they can host it outside the U.S til they sort out their reality issues
Already is, and it’s intentionally internationally distributed for this exact reason in as well as some benefits to accessibility.
Left wing bias = says objectively true things about me I don’t like.
I mean, there’s definitely an Americanized liberal valence to Wikipedia editing, primarily because the website is administered and edited by a bunch of libertarian-leaning liberals. But that’s not the only source of editing. In fact, the primary problem with Wikipedia is that there are so many blind spots the admins can’t track and such a huge incentive to fudge history in your own favor. The idea that the website is objective is fucking horseshit and instances of manipulation are well-documented.
Wikipedia Scanner – the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith – offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
…
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Cruz’s problem is that he’s wildly unpopular. Consequently, the site tends to be bombarded by folks posting “Ted Cruz fucked it again” tags to his biography far faster than his own team can polish his hagiography and take down negative news bits. If he was less high profile or more popular, he wouldn’t have this problem.
I love it when this comes up in internet arguments. The mob often agrees with an individual’s statement that Wikipedia is bad, and then when asked for an example it’s always 100% something absolutely insane. The logical conclusion is that we’re all wrong in different ways, but some people simply refuse to accept it and argue with the encyclopedia.
The truth has a left wing bias.
Ted Cruz thinks we should stop attacking pedophiles
Anything he does from now on is an attempt to distract us from that uncharacteristically candid statement
Do not treat this as just a tantrum. It’s the right’s playbook of moving the overton window to the right by taking extreme positions and invoking the golden mean fallacy. It certainly has worked on MSM.
golden mean fallacy
Ooh that’s a new one for me.
Asserting that given any two positions, there exists a compromise between them that must be correct.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argument-to-Moderation
It certainly has worked on MSM.
Its been less effective on independent media and journalists. But its also just a rhetorical ploy. The real rightward shift in mass media towards conservative bias has come with mass consolidation of media ownership over the last 40 years.
Where as we once had a plethora of different regionalized perspectives and local coverage pools, now we’re dealing with national syndication of conservative opinion pieces, police-blotter local news (incentivized by far-right broadcast managers), and wave after wave of native advertising used to turn news media into a more profitable revenue stream.
I would say the worst thing about modern American local news isn’t even the naked reactionary Op-Eds and crime stories. It is the daily drum-beat piece about the lottery - who is winning, how much the pot is worth, where you can buy tickets, how many people are excited to participate… Fucking horrible. Since I gave up terrestrial TV, these ads stick out like a pus-spewing boil on the face of every single broadcast news feed.
Cruz alleged that “bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia’s reliable sources/perennial sources list” because it describes “MSNBC and CNN as ‘generally reliable’ sources, while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a ‘blacklisted’ and ‘deprecated’ source that Wikipedia’s editors have determined ‘promotes disinformation.’”
It’s kind of funny how when your goal becomes to present factual information, there aren’t many especially right-leaning sources. I wonder why that might be.
Can you think of why that might be the case, Ted?
Also, these ding-a-lings keep confusing rather mid corporate news outlets as “liberal”. Also, it’s awfully interesting how butthurt the right is about SPLC, I have to say. They’ve been howling about that one for years. Gosh, I wonder what it is about SPLC that makes them so angry?
Reminds me of how they used to howl about ACORN until they had that little weasel O’Keefe make up a bunch of bullshit about it. Of course, a lot of these little shits have been whining about Wikipedia ever since its inception, since people constantly use it as a way to refute their LIES.
Also, these ding-a-lings keep confusing rather mid corporate news outlets as “liberal”.
This is how you move the Overton window.
It’s arguably true in the traditional sense of “liberal”. But these are the same Republicans who also use “liberal” and “Marxist” interchangeably, so that’s probably not their point.
Reality has a liberal bias
I continue to think its extremely insensitive to call him Ted. He doesn’t believe in preferred names. Use his real name Rafael Edward Cruz. Yes its /s but I’m serious. Call that POS Rafael.
Sorry Ted, no one will ever forget how Trump made your suck his cock after he insulted your wife.
If reality is left of you, maybe your position is far too right?
No it’s obviously reality that’s to blame!
