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.’”
wikipedia just tells the truth it just happens that the truth has a left-wing bias
It must not be protecting pedofiles hard enough
To quote “Stephen Colbert” (the character) at one of the George W. Bush White House Correspondants Dinners:
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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/
Left wing bias = says objectively true things about me I don’t like.
This is literally where we are right now.
My MAGA parents told me that they consume news “from both sides”. When pressed to name a single source that they consider on the left, they could not. They didn’t even try to say “CNN” or some shit, they simply could not come up with a single source.
So thankfully, they recognized their irrationality, and are no longer MAGA.
Lol jk 🥲
Both sides = Fox News vs Newsmax
You’re forgetting the center: OAN.
Reality tends to have a strong left wing bias indeed.
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.
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
Any publisher of truth exhibits strong anti-fascist bias. That’s because fascism is inherently anti-truth
Not false. Reality is proven to have 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’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?
I’m not sure ol’ Rafael is capable of thought.
He is very capable of thought. He’s an intelligent and well educated man who puts on a persona to further his own agenda. He is lacking empathy and morals, not thought.
He’s an intelligent and well educated man…
I have yet to see any evidence of that. Everything I’ve heard from him has always been utterly moronic.
He probably took on the mantra of the SubGenius, but for dark purposes: “Act like a dumbshit, and they’ll treat you like an equal”.
I’ve seen Ted Cruz eat his own boogers.
He graduated from Princeton, and Harvard Law School. He is not a stupid person, it’s mostly an act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Education
That said, conservatism seems to literally damage the brain, so he’s probably gotten dumber over the years.
Little Raffy doesn’t even deserve a cute irreverent nickname. Just another asshole trying to ruin the world
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.
Ted isn’t confusing anything here, he knows exactly what he is doing.
ACORN
Jesus Christ, things were so quaint back then…
Sorry, yeah, I should have pointed out that the con base are the ones getting confused. The likes of Ted definitely know what they are doing when it comes to this lie.
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.
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.
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.
Reality has a liberal bias
I recently looked into this on another forum where someone shared some articles supposedly proving bias. One article was itself highly biased to the right, so not particularly credible.
The other article, from an organization that ranked the bias of news sources, was very neutral and objective, took accusations of bias seriously, went into detail, and removed the “unbiased” classification from Wikipedia, but didn’t conclude any provable bias, leaving it unranked. The best example of bias they had was the fact that articles on socialism and communism didn’t list Soviet atrocities, but those atrocities have their own pages and are also mentioned on pages of the countries involved, so that was not a great example.
All these accusations are just the result of a massive right-wing campaign against facts and reality-based reporting. Everything that doesn’t follow their propaganda is biased, according to them.
Everything that doesn’t follow their propaganda is biased, according to them.
This is really what it comes down to.
The Wikipedia page for Capitalism also doesn’t have any atrocities in my quick check; the “criticism” section is fairly short and tame. Somehow though I’m sure this doesn’t bother conservatives.
And to act like communism can only exist in a soviet context is just ridiculous. Like you said, the atrocities are very real and have their own pages because they’re not really so directly connected to communism. We shouldn’t lump every nasty thing the US has done into the capitalism page, either.
God, I just wish for once conservatives would have a thought that was even vaguely consistent across their worldview but in the end all we get is record-breaking hypocrisy and twisted feelings over any kind of sense.
That’s what you get when you build your whole worldview and political platform on feelings instead of provable facts.
What is what you get? Complete control over what was previously considered the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet?
while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science.
You mean that Fox News that argued it’s an entertainment show that no reasonable person would take seriously?
Is this the same Fox News that had to pay out a $800,000,000 settlement for lying about the 2020 election?
Did they ever pay that? Where’d the money end up?
Yep, they paid Dominion Voting Systems who sued them for libel and then during discovery exposed that they had intentionally misled their audience. They paid various others for lying too but Dominion was the most consequential.
