> Before being named U.S. attorney, Martin appeared on Russia-backed media networks more than 150 times, The Washington Post reported last week. In one appearance on RT in 2022, he said there was no evidence of military buildup on Ukraine’s boarders only nine days before Russia invaded the country. He further criticized U.S. officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia security concerns.
This is getting ridiculous. Is there anyone associated with this administration who does not have a record of promoting Russia's positions?
NelsonMinar 2 hours ago [-]
Martin was also at the coup attempt on Jan 6 and on that day said "Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy. Ignore #FakeNews". https://archive.ph/jekzQ
kristopolous 1 hours ago [-]
That's more relevant. RT has had some fairly legitimate people on it such as Larry King, Julian Assange, John Pilger, Amy Goodman... Many Pulitzer prize and Peabody winners ... It's a mixed bag, people can't be so reductive about it.
Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
We have the capability of being adults here. Whether we are or not is always a choice.
ncallaway 23 minutes ago [-]
Ed Martin made 198 TV appearances on RT in 2023 and 2024.
How many RT TV hits did Larry King do? How recently did King appear on RT?
NelsonMinar 1 hours ago [-]
RT is not legit. It is Russian propaganda. When those people participated they were collaborators.
46 minutes ago [-]
myst 46 minutes ago [-]
You are saying it like the Russian propaganda is somehow worse then other propagandas.
thenberlin 3 minutes ago [-]
Entirely uncritical state controlled or substantially aligned media masquerading as news is always bad and should be criticized. See also almost anyone called on in White House press briefings these days.
Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."
usernomdeguerre 30 minutes ago [-]
If NelsonMinar doesn't say it, I will.
25 minutes ago [-]
intermerda 17 minutes ago [-]
> Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
I'm not sure who's claiming that here. The RT appearance in question is about him spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda on the eve of Ukraine invasion.
kristopolous 4 minutes ago [-]
It's pretty constant on hn. People paint everything from country X, holistically, with some broad and blunt moral brush.
It reads like a cartoon. Everything from China is loaded with secret spyware snooping on you for countless unspecified evils - everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.
I point it out as absurd and reductive whenever I see it and people dogpile on me like I desecrated a sacred cow.
r053bud 3 hours ago [-]
We voted for this! This is “democracy” at work
candiddevmike 3 hours ago [-]
Less than 30% of voter age Americans voted for this
rayiner 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
rchaud 1 hours ago [-]
The majority that did vote, voted for this. The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries. Given the standards of media literacy and civics education, there's no evidence that a higher participation rate would have changed the outcome.
nntwozz 33 minutes ago [-]
> The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries.
The general election in 2022 had 84,2% of eligible voters in Sweden.
riffraff 9 minutes ago [-]
Italy had 64% for the parliamentary elections in 2022, which is the lowest ever but it's pretty far from 30%.
cscurmudgeon 5 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
pesus 1 hours ago [-]
Plurality, not majority. It may be pedantic but it's an important difference.
rafram 53 minutes ago [-]
I was going to say that it was a majority this time, but it seems like the results shifted as more votes were counted after election night, and he ended up with 49.8%. Still, unbelievably, pretty close to a majority.
mulmen 21 minutes ago [-]
There’s also no evidence that increased turnout would have had the same result.
What seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the skill with which American voters have been disenfranchised by partisan forces.
It’s easy to blame people for not voting if you ignore the real difficulties in actually casting a vote for many Americans.
Narkov 49 minutes ago [-]
> The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries.
Australia has entered the chat.
akio 50 minutes ago [-]
The majority did not vote for Trump, and I question how many of the minority that did vote for him voted for this, specifically. Almost certainly not all of them, given his approval rating is now well below his popular vote share.
monkeyelite 2 hours ago [-]
What presidential elections are you comparing it to?
makeitdouble 56 minutes ago [-]
"American democracy"
fnordpiglet 2 hours ago [-]
And a minority of those who did vote voted for this.
4 minutes ago [-]
ty6853 3 hours ago [-]
I mean yes? Democracy is a pretty poor model for governance. IMO peak enlightenment happened circa the 17th or 18th century when classical liberalism decided government should be based on individual liberties and anything outside of that is decided democratically not because it is a good system but because votes are roughly a tally of who would win if we all pull knives on each other because we didn't like the vote.
makeitdouble 46 minutes ago [-]
Democracy is not 2 parties doing voter suppression and gerrymandering as a filter to pass the result to an electoral college.
The US system was never designed to be fair to individuals in the first place, pointing at it as a failure of democracy is IMHO pulling the actual issues under the rug.
sapphicsnail 26 minutes ago [-]
How can someone talk about democracy peaking when the franchise was extended to a tiny minority of the population. You don't give a damn about individual liberties, you only care that the "right" people have liberty.
edgyquant 22 minutes ago [-]
That poster is specifically arguing against democracy
sapphicsnail 13 minutes ago [-]
Your right. I stand corrected. They don't give a damn about democracy or individual liberties.
entropicdrifter 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
33 minutes ago [-]
Shekelphile 56 minutes ago [-]
I'm not convinced at all that the election wasn't stolen. Trump ran is a very bland campaign to the point where he was skipping major events and people in his circle seemed assured of victory months before the election.
jfengel 44 minutes ago [-]
I know that Harris put up zero fight about it. I infer that she believed it to be legitimate.
That's not definitive, to be sure. But it's sufficient for me to believe that we did this to ourselves. Now all we can do is figure out how we're going to get through it.
toast0 46 minutes ago [-]
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think actual election fraud, big enough to steal an election, would be too big to miss.
Yes, it might only take a small number of votes in the right place, but either you somehow know the right place, or you have to move a lot of votes.
There's a reasonable discussion to be had along the lines of 'these guys seem to be doing everything they whine about', but could they get a big operation done without a) bragging openly about it, b) leaving a big trail, or c) having a falling out with a conspirator who then tells all.
wongarsu 42 minutes ago [-]
Trump did thank that "very popular guy. He was very effective. And he knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote counting computers, and we won Pennsylvania in a landslide." If Biden or Obama had said something like that the nation would be in uproar.
Democracy built lies, decide, and rejection of facts through propaganda.
Really need a viable means to fight it, say allowing an elected official's constitutes being able to sue them for no less than $10,000 for incidence of bearing false witness. Help erode the dark money networks.
Also having a 4th branch of Governments, the people with State and Federal binding resolution, would help. Only way to overrides those in power is to unionize the will.
westmeal 3 hours ago [-]
The suing thing would be cool but the court system is slow by design. I can't see it working in practice however I'm also really fed up with the bullshit so i understand.
Ar-Curunir 2 hours ago [-]
Good luck relying on a court of law when the President suspends courts and arrests judges. The latter is happening right now.
Fauntleroy 4 hours ago [-]
If Russia were trying to destroy the United States from the inside, how would things be any different than they are now?
kylecazar 3 hours ago [-]
If they were any good at it there would probably be less overt Russian sympathizing.
kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jfengel 41 minutes ago [-]
Except that's not coming from the top. Tens of millions of people wanted this.
Maybe this is indeed what Russia would do to us. But we're beating them to the punch by doing it to ourselves.
esseph 3 hours ago [-]
They'd be the exact same.
It's like like Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics was a wish list.
walrus01 4 hours ago [-]
Well, considering they have a very high ranking guy in the Putin regime who considers that to be his full time job, google "Vladislav Surkov", they seem to be doing a fairly effective job of it so far.
hightrix 3 hours ago [-]
Russia has a pretty high ranking guy in the US Government as well, google Krasnov.
BannedUser1 20 minutes ago [-]
Think that's bad?
Wait til you learn how many have Israeli connections (or even citizenship!).
rsingel 1 minutes ago [-]
Acting DC AG Martin has a history of sockpuppetry. Bought a sycophant a laptop and then ghostwrote Facebook posts attacking a judge in a case against Martin. Should have been disbarred.
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
flask_manager 36 minutes ago [-]
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
gotoeleven 22 minutes ago [-]
It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.
moritonal 47 minutes ago [-]
I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.
tonymet 31 minutes ago [-]
I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.
It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.
It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.
Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.
Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.
And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.
brightball 47 minutes ago [-]
I always wonder why certain topics are locked.
sedev 38 minutes ago [-]
For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...
thallium205 49 minutes ago [-]
Why is their editor so awful to use?
22 minutes ago [-]
jjmarr 4 hours ago [-]
The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example:
There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.
Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.
It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view.
Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.
bjourne 3 hours ago [-]
I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppets have endless patience and all the time in the world.
gonzobonzo 40 minutes ago [-]
Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process.
And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
kurtreed2 3 hours ago [-]
One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.
jjmarr 2 hours ago [-]
A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
> only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy
This is false. The talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_(harassment_cam... lays it out clearly: because of the nature of Gamergate (misogynist harassment campaign), the page about Gamergate is heavily scrutinized in order to make sure that all source cites follow the same reliable-source rules that are in force across all of Wikipedia. Please don't lie about Wikipedia.
acdha 3 hours ago [-]
Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.
freen 3 hours ago [-]
Anecdote != evidence.
Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.
Seems extra “special case” to me.
jjmarr 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
moshegramovsky 3 hours ago [-]
> You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda.
What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
No claims, no evidence. No sources, except "it has come to my attention" and "information received by my office".
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
Yikes that letter is alarming.
> In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny?
What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.
""But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. "
tintor 3 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia needs decentralized hosting infra, away from any single country. It is way too important.
bawolff 16 minutes ago [-]
Decentralization typically means instead of being subject to one crazy government you are subject to multiple and have to deal with all.
I think wikipedia's approach of centralizing in one place but allowing downloading backups and making all sourcecode and server config public is better. If the worst happens anyone can setup a fork.
dewey 10 minutes ago [-]
The hosting isn’t important, it’s easy to move or have an offline copy already. The access to fundraising is much more important and more complicated.
imglorp 2 hours ago [-]
Start backing it up now. Partisan influence could be as minor as forcing some edits or as major as pulling their DNS. Every authoritarian in the world follows this same playbook. Over started looking into kiwix.
IA is at risk too.
kurtreed2 55 minutes ago [-]
You can download backups of Wikipedia articles at dumps.wikimedia.org. For the IA they had a plan to move to Canada back in 2017.
vFunct 3 hours ago [-]
Letter should be thrown in the trash. Let him bring up charges if they feel a crime has been committed.
Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. They want you to believe that truth is subjective. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
There is a long legacy of authoritarian regimes attacking curious places, universities, historians, museums, books or any institution that grounds itself in reality which provides you a way to reasonably criticize authoritarian actions. Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
Wikipedia is absolutely the enemy of this administration and authoritarians everywhere in the world would love to see it's demise or collapse into chaos.
Whether the Wikipedia page for Israel says Gaza is a genocide or not, or that it's an ongoing debate matters. It matters because it influences what people think and therefore what they consent to or what they deem worth fighting for or applying resources to and that goes for just about any issue out there. If you can't read about the suffering that racism has caused, then how bad is racism really? If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
timewizard 3 minutes ago [-]
> provide alternative legitimacy to authority.
Authority is never legitimate. Those that claim special rights to it because they bring "truth" or "reason" are the most suspect of them all.
> Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
This is a letter not the killing fields.
> It matters because it influences what people think
That people find this a defensible position and believe that just finding the "right editors" or "true guardians" can vouchsafe this poor outcome for humanity is always surprising to me.
Shouldn't people have access to reported information and then come to their own educated conclusions?
> If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
The existence of Wikipedia is a convenience and perhaps not one that should be given tax free status. I think the selected history of labor movements will be just fine.
Even if Wikipedia died tomorrow because of one letter you could still walk into any bookstore in America and buy a book on any subject you want.
moshegramovsky 2 hours ago [-]
> Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
Well said.
Hannah Arendt wrote a great book about this, but it sounds like you might have already read it.
emacsen 3 hours ago [-]
Aren't you making their point though?
The ADL and other Jewish organizations have pointed out that aside from articles about Israel that articles about or mention Jewish topics generally have been editing with disinformation or that made Jews out to be the aggressors.
I agree with you that in order to believe in the ideals of liberal democracy that we must have a core belief in truth. And it's absolutely true that the Trump administration has taken a position that is deeply chilling on the issue of speech. It's clear they want to be the sole arbiters of what "truth" is and they want to use their power to manipulate the reality.
All that said, I cannot as a Jew ignore the fact that Wikipedia is not in itself neutral, and that "more eyes" does not negate systemic bias. What I've seen as a Jew is what the true meaning of marginalized minority is, which is to say that if you are truly a minority and truly marginalized then in a vote of "truth", your reality will be dismissed if it conflicts with the vast majority, and that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population.
While I brought it up, I am not debating the issue of antisemitic bias in Wikipedia[1] as anything other than an illustration of your point of objective truth being true, but also that we can't simply rely on the wisdom of the crowd to materialize that truth.
To preemptively address the issue that's bound to come up when I post this- I'm not arguing that the evils of silencing the entire Wikipedia project are equal to or a fair response to Wikipedia's antisemitic bias. I do believe Wikipedia needs to address its bias problem and that's best done through internal reform.
Two wrongs don't make a right, nor are two wrongs always of equal weight.
[1] Firstly because my point is separate, and secondly because I've encountered the exact issues I've found in Wikipedia elsewhere, which is why I'm sure I'll be voted down.
moshegramovsky 2 hours ago [-]
I agree 100%. It's exhausting fighting against antisemitic bias, and it feels like it's everywhere these days. My problem with Ed Martin is that what he is doing is clearly wrong. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about people like him.
emacsen 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that my comment is -2 on HN is a great example of the problem.
I'm working on a solution to the effects of this isolation, but it's not ready for a big announcement.
giraffe_lady 2 hours ago [-]
Could one of you point me to antisemitic bias on wikipedia just so I have a concrete example at hand?
I'm not sure the organization that defended Musk's Nazi salute is a reliable source on antisemitism.
emacsen 2 hours ago [-]
Basically, almost any time Zionists are mentioned, they're mentioned in a negative light and with genuine disinformation, such as that Zionism is the belief that Arabs needs to be destroyed. That is like saying the Civil Rights movement in the US was about killing white people.
They also position things in such a way that implies antisemitic things, such as saying that Zionism is only 200 years old, or discussing the Israel wars only or primarily through an Arab lens.
These biases around Jewish topics are small individually but large in aggregate, especially in how they present Jews and Jewish topics.
Multiple Jewish and civil rights organizations have done a more comprehensive job at discussing this, even organizations who don't usually agree on things. While they talk about "anti-Israel bias" Wikipedia articles on or mentioning Zionism (80% of Jews are Zionist) are IMHO just as, if not more damaging, and demonstrate the issue.
Most importantly though, talk to the Jews in your life about this. They will tell you.
Most of the jews I know are through anti-genocide activism and they have a different view of this. I wanted to check because it is important to me that I not engage in antisemitism. Thanks for the info.
emacsen 1 hours ago [-]
The idea of contrasting what I said with being "anti-genocide" implies that people who disagree with you are "pro-genocide".
Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would ask that, if you can, try to consider that there are nuances, and that using triggering language does not bring understanding, it only amplifies conflict.
That said, this conversation has been too difficult for me, and I'm not going to engage with you on it further.
giraffe_lady 1 hours ago [-]
No I mean literally we are part of an organization focused on preventing and ending genocide broadly. Israel-palestine is one of them but there are several others ongoing and several more that may escalate into genocide in the next few months or years. I do see why you have a hard time with wikipedia.
giraffe_lady 2 hours ago [-]
Could you point me to an example of what you have in mind on wikipedia? I'm admittedly not as practiced at discerning subtle antisemitism as I am some other forms of discrimination. But also usually when it's being alluded to in the abstract like this people mean something closer to "criticism of israel's actions."
This is the same ADL that said that Nazi salutes are fine, but that protesting against genocide isn't? Why do we care what the ADL says about anything? They're fascist sympathisers.
moshegramovsky 2 hours ago [-]
It was not remotely okay that they did this, and I agree that refusing to speak out severely hurt their credibility. The next time I get a fundraising email, I'm going to tell them they can kiss something.
emacsen 2 hours ago [-]
Demanding moral perfection from an organization in order to believe that discrimination exists is a standard that I don't believe is fair to any group.
TRiG_Ireland 2 hours ago [-]
I don't demand "moral perfection", but I draw the line at overt fascism. The ADL are fascist sympathisers.
emacsen 1 hours ago [-]
Did you read the statement they put out later that day about Musk, or the day after?
I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made.
This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.
almosthere 4 hours ago [-]
It's 2 paragraphs... What's the substance of the allegation?
moshegramovsky 3 hours ago [-]
He doesn't have a leg to stand on and he knows it. Otherwise he would empanel a grand jury and wait for indictments. He is a partisan sadist and he loves to use the legal system to abuse people.
jimt1234 1 hours ago [-]
The allegation is the substance.
mikeyouse 4 hours ago [-]
It’s a similar nonsense letter to the same ones he sent to several prominent medical journals. Speech chilling, 1st amendment violating unsubstantiated threats on DOJ letterhead. Of all the unfit people in this administration, he’s likely the most unfit. His entire career has been deeply unethical and partisan and often borderline illegal.
mindslight 2 hours ago [-]
But what about The Twitter Files?! (cue X-Files intro music)
hodgesrm 4 hours ago [-]
In my humble opinion Wikipedia is the single best thing thing to emerge from the Internet boom. Its name is a wordplay on one of the most important intellectual projects of the Enlightment.[0] The DC prosecutor letter reads like something straight out of the totalitarian playbook.[1]
Please donate now to show your support. It's time to fight back against this crap.
Hi I don't know if you know it but Wikipedias not that poor or hard pressed... Atleast, the whole "donate or we broke" narrative that they build every few months is complete bullshit
https://youtu.be/3t8GUbzVxmQ?si=sa_oHe3DA_QmpGcE
vFunct 3 hours ago [-]
I have a question on non-profits in general. What exactly is the advantage of being incorporated as a non-profit, when all you have to do to not be taxed as a for-profit corporation is spend all your money each year and not show any profit? It seems you'd have more privacy as a for-profit corporation, since you don't have to disclose donors.
hollerith 3 hours ago [-]
If I donate to a
501(c)(3) organization, the donation gets very favorable treatment by the tax code, reducing my taxes (provided I have income that can be cancelled out by the donation).
0x457 2 hours ago [-]
hmm, please correct me if I'm wrong, but donations just decrease your tax liability by the amount you've donated. It's the same as if you donated your pre-tax dollars to 501(c)(3) org.
toast0 34 minutes ago [-]
The second sentence is mostly accurate, but the first implies something else.
If your taxable income was $50,000 and you donate $10,000, and (some other conditions) your taxable income would now be $40,000; same as if you managed to move the money pre-tax.
However. If you donate aprechiated capital assets, you get two benefits. Your taxable income is offset by the value of the asset, and the capital gains disappear. It's much better than selling the asset and donating the proceeds; and it's handy if you don't have good records for your cost basis.
hollerith 51 minutes ago [-]
That is how I think it works in general. But my guess is that there are complications.
dragonwriter 3 hours ago [-]
Charity non-profits -- 501c3 organizations -- have donations that are tax deductible for their donors. Other kinds of nonprofits have other advantages to their stakeholders, but usually the attention around "nonprofits" is specifically about 501c3 orgs.
droopyEyelids 3 hours ago [-]
Eligibility to receive grants & tax deductible donations, public perception & credibility
aingling 4 hours ago [-]
It sounds like this attorney is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. He's noticed the political bias and is reacting to that, but actually the problem is much deeper than this.
Anyone who's been involved in Wikipedia editing for long enough, especially on divisive topics, knows that this is indeed the case:
"Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material"
Fact is, there are many topics on Wikipedia that follow an editorial line set down by a small group of powerful editors, some of which has even adversely influenced general policy that affects all articles.
This is mostly why I stopped editing. I realized that what I was contributing to - for free - was a project being used to push a particular world view, while purporting to be neutral. And this has become entrenched. That's not something I want any part of, even if I agree with much of that world view myself.
adipose 4 hours ago [-]
Can you give particular examples of the particular worldview that they are trying to push?
As soon as Harris ran for POTUS they edited out that her dad was characterized as a Marxist scholar and then viciously defended any attempt to re-instate it.
acdha 16 minutes ago [-]
More accurately, they rejected the wave of people who tried to add that single word to characterize of his entire career but were not otherwise contributing anything to the article. There’s a good discussion here highlighting how they were looking for substantial improvements by people who were actually familiar with his work, not just trying to affix a label to someone they were otherwise unfamiliar with.
They (those worried about commie political bias) could do their own public digital university and social media websites. Instead of being free, they could charge a fee that would both serve to repel the freetards and fund the project.
Oh shit! That happened already, didn't it? How is it going at attracting talented individuals?
We should remember that anti-wikipedia propaganda exists for decades now. Despite of that, it is a place cherished by many (including non commies). Its demise would be a public disaster.
Hoarders will maintain copies of it. And if there is bias, there will be tons of biased bootlegs around.
Further investigation would be more wise than rapid decisions by instinct.
sgnelson 1 hours ago [-]
Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior of a government based on democratic ideals.
Tycho 50 minutes ago [-]
I think it’s fairly obvious that the Democrat establishment has been abusing its power through NGOs, media collusion, judicial overreach, lawfare, selective non-prosecution, show trials, pre-emotive pardons, vaccine mandates, de-banking/de-platforming and censorship. A little pushback and suddenly it’s “totalitarianism”.
acdha 36 minutes ago [-]
Citation needed for anything on the scale we’ve seen - for example, the topic of this discussion is a non-profit having their status threatened for non-specific reasons which appear to be constitutionally-protected speech. If it’s “fairly obvious”, you should have no trouble providing examples of something equivalent to this legal threat.
Tycho 15 minutes ago [-]
I recall right-leaning social media sites like Gab, Parler, r/TheDonald, Infowars being taken offline.
I can’t read the WP article because it’s paywalled, however I have been suspicious of Wikimedia for a long time. I used to donate to them thinking I was helping to keep the severs running, then being alarmed to find the money was going on all sorts of nonsense. The former CEO (Maher) was blatantly a political/intelligence operator. Fits the pattern of the establishment/powers-that-be abusing the NGO/non-profit sector to illicitly further their aims, so I’m not surprised the new DoJ are looking into them.
acdha 6 minutes ago [-]
Those sites weren’t taken offline by Democratic officials, they had to find new hosting after breaking the contracts they entered into with private companies. They were still free to move elsewhere, as they did, whereas in this case Wikipedia is being threatened with penalties for remaining in the country.
I would also note that the last straw for companies like Parler was involvement in a violent attempt to overthrow the government whereas in this case the objection appears to be constitutionally-protected speech. Again, those are nowhere near comparable situations. Where is something like, say, going after a right-wing non-profit because they published content which criticized Biden?
poincaredisk 39 minutes ago [-]
I have no idea if that's true, maybe it is, but the parent specifically asked for a response without whataboutism.
TZubiri 4 hours ago [-]
As a non american that edited wikipedia.
You guys control the servers, if anything you have the psyop advantage.
However, the librarians are very vocal about self determination and keeping wikimedia out of important decisions.
rawgabbit 4 hours ago [-]
Same person also threatened the New England Journal of Medicine. Thought crime is real.
All US organizations should seriously consider moving out of the country, at this point; it might become harder to do it in the future
jtrip 5 hours ago [-]
The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.
Loughla 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sad for myself. I'm older and established. I'm scared for my cousins, nieces, nephews, and children for the fucking train wreck they're going to step into.
It was bad enough with 2001, 2008, and 2020. But this is next level.
MPSFounder 4 hours ago [-]
The PhD institution I went to reduced their acceptance from 50 to 26. There is fear of not securing funding. The damage done is projects that are promising were cut. These projects will get picked up by other countries. The damage in the long term will be losing our edge in many regards, which will harm our economy. Where I did my undergrad just replaced their dean with an AIPAC member who has no experience in academia (a first in nearly two hundred years of this institution's). It is insane what is happening. A judge in Wisconsin was arrested today. There are those who believe America is resilient. The damage being done (I can promise you) will cause this great nation unbelievable harm in the long run, when this traitor in charge and his foreign allies (Putin and Netanyahu) which he promises allegiance to OVER our constitution and our moral values have long since passed. There is much noise, much of it as a distraction, but on the small level, many changes (most recently the NSF director leaving) are tangible changes that have a real impact that is certainly felt immediately in budget cuts, but will be even more drastic in its long term strategic impact. Also, I fly a bunch, and I see an immediate change in the respect America used to command abroad. Our values and reputation, which took over a hundred years in the making, became a laughing stock, and our closest allies no longer view America as a beacon.
sneak 4 hours ago [-]
The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
consumer451 4 hours ago [-]
> What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
Can you walk me through how you see this playing out, step-by-step?
I want to believe!
energy123 45 minutes ago [-]
Revolutionaries tend to suffer from extreme naivete or arrogance. They don't understand that idealists like them usually get pushed aside or killed by the real crazies during the power vacuum stage, then the country becomes significantly worse. It's happened so many times in history. Until the US starts killing half of its population like Pol Pot did it can always get worse.
sneak 4 hours ago [-]
Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
bigthymer 2 hours ago [-]
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
empthought 3 hours ago [-]
> but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
You've cherry-picked a few bogeymen.
What about Norman Borlaug, Bell Laboratories, the Gates Foundation, Margaret Sanger and the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology?
mikeyouse 4 hours ago [-]
Remember when people pretended it was the scandal of all scandals that the IRS was reviewing PACs who were forbidden from doing political activity for political activity? And now many of those same people are cheering this, and the act blue ‘investigation’, and the threats against Harvard’s tax exempt status for nakedly corrupt reasons? Man I wish shame still had some stopping power.
milesrout 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
anigbrowl 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think those accusations need to be taken seriously while they're being hyped by people like Jim Jordan. If they have evidence of wrongdoing they should forward it to the DoJ and write it up in an indictment, where it can be reviewed by a court and jury that will evaluate the claims made therein.
mikeyouse 4 hours ago [-]
I’m sure you’d find the exact same thing if some grifty billionaire funded a fake investigation into those people who were contributing money to WinRed and yet, only one of the two is facing investigation.. it is so far past the time when this DOJ should be given the benefit of the doubt and steel manning their obvious corruption doesn’t make anyone seem scholarly, just credulous.
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago [-]
It's not true that only one of the two is facing investigation. Multiple state AGs are investigating WinRed, and rightly so - there's substantial evidence that they're using dark patterns to trick people into recurring donations when they intended to donate only once. The controversy is that a political official is ordering an investigation of ActBlue, not that political fundraising platforms ought to be above scrutiny.
mikeyouse 4 hours ago [-]
Federally it certainly is true. And I agree, they shouldn’t be above scrutiny which is why it’s so important for the DOJ to maintain their independence and to avoid partisanship.. but Elon was loudly claiming they were funding the Tesla protests a few weeks ago and the rest of the administration got in line to encourage this pretextual nonsense.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mikeyouse 4 hours ago [-]
Go ahead and read some of the thousands of 1-star reviews on TrustPilot for WinRed:
It turns out the name of the political donation game is recurring donations and spammy messages. I 100% believe people donated to some random cause via act blue and didn’t realize they were signing up for recurring donations through there —- like all political fundraising arms do as evidenced by all the people complaining that WinRed incessantly removes money from their account that they didn’t authorize. But again, only 1 of the 2 is being investigated and it’s obviously a corrupt investigation so here we are.
_DeadFred_ 4 hours ago [-]
Now imagine a sitting President personally saying 'the highest holders of my grift coin get a personal visit with me'. That would seem odd, wouldn't it?
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
You can call Donald Trump a dirtbag and say that giving visits to Trump token holders is corrupt. You can and should investigate whether that is illegal. I have no issue with this.
That doesn’t mean that random people who don’t know who an organisation is should be giving political donations to that organisation.
In short, your logical fallacy is: whataboutism
——
Edit for Fauntleroy below due to rate limit:
No. The only thing I have discussed is the accusations against actblue, which I did not bring up. I have bought up no other topics.
—-
Edit for deadfred: hence asking about if anyone is alleging identical behaviour from WinRed earlier. From what I have seen, they are not.
Edit 2 for deadfred: "You narrowed to ActBlue" no I did not. mikeyouse bought ActBlue up. "there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue" yes there is - either they did what they are being accused or they did not.
_DeadFred_ 4 hours ago [-]
Accusing others of whataboutism is a way to dodge the real point: if identical behavior is excused for allies but condemned for opponents, the outrage isn't about ethics it's about weaponized partisanship.
Edit in response: The broader conversation is about weaponizing government power against political opponents, ActBlue was just one example give in many being discussed. You narrowed to ActBlue to have something you felt you could condemn safely, while ignoring the larger pattern. That selective focus is the weaponization your argument is trying to distract from.
Edit: Stepping back and noting the pattern there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue. Especially when this VERY administration is blatantly selling access with their shill coin. Your hyper focus is a weaponized distraction, a 'gotcha' from the larger discussion. The administration does not care about corruption in fundraising, they care about targeting their opposition and shutting down any influence they have via fundraising, via information/knowledge sharing on the web, via universities with students willing to challenge the status quo.
Fauntleroy 4 hours ago [-]
You started this (soon to be flagged to nonexistence) chain with whataboutism.
what 4 hours ago [-]
>soon to be flagged to non existence
Are you organizing a brigade offsite?
3 hours ago [-]
outside1234 3 hours ago [-]
Is this the start of the shakedown by Trump to start allowing misinformation?
moshegramovsky 2 hours ago [-]
I fear the answer is yes. Did you hear about the "gala dinner" for the top 220 holders of his meme coin? I wish I was joking.
Power corrupts...
tonetheman 4 hours ago [-]
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jmclnx 5 hours ago [-]
Well seems the war on truth has started. There is a 1984 quote about history that escapes me now.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
shmerl 5 hours ago [-]
Probably:
> We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?
myth_drannon 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AlienRobot 5 hours ago [-]
I have never had a single problem with Wikipedia in 20 years, and I don't believe an alternative exists. All text written on Wikipedia is royalty free and so are most of the images. The meaningfulness of that can't be overstated. Wikipedia is the web's greatest website and a wonder of the world.
You can't love the web without loving Wikipedia, so I'm wary of anyone who disrespects it.
jimt1234 5 hours ago [-]
In my 20-year experience with Wikipedia, I've seen one factual error relating to the Chicago Cubs, something really minor. But yeah, that's it.
Ar-Curunir 5 hours ago [-]
Absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is infinitely better than every source of “facts” out there.
hagbard_c 4 hours ago [-]
No, Wikipedia is no better than any other site which allows user edits and in many ways reliably biased towards certain narratives - which narrative depends on the subject of the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles should always be read in conjunction with the Talk and Edit history pages and even then it is necessary to find original sources for any claims made in Wikipedia articles.
BoingBoomTschak 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gwervc 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
spamizbad 4 hours ago [-]
If you call something gender fluid you lose tax exempt status? Good to know.
I just feel that logically this doesn't make any sense. Having the view or even promoting the idea that a mythical creature is "gender fluid" isn't an overt political action. It doesn't help any political party or politician. There are numerous fully-compliant tax-exempt organizations that directly aid LGBTQIA+ individuals. How are these above board but having someone submit content to your organization that claims the Nure-onna might be genderfluid is crossing into the realm of politics by influencing election outcomes?
_DeadFred_ 4 hours ago [-]
I hope we don't ban Sci-Fi because someone reads all the 'current thing woke infected' 1960s sci-fi where gender switching was super common.
miltonlost 4 hours ago [-]
Do you have the Japanese folklore monster article? Citation needed please. Because, if the monster can, you know, shift genders, then maybe gender fluid is an accurate term.
4 hours ago [-]
Alupis 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
duskwuff 4 hours ago [-]
Despite anything he may say about himself, Larry Sanger is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "the founder of Wikipedia". He was a paid employee of the project in 2001; his involvement with the site ended in early 2002 when funding for the position ran out. His experience with the site nearly 25 years ago does not make him an authority on how it is run today.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia’s article on Sanger calls him cofounder and credits him with its name:
“ Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/ ⓘ;[1] born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies.”
"Co-founder" is debatable, but he certainly wasn't "the founder" of the site.
Regardless - whether you choose to describe Sanger's early involvement with Wikipedia as a "founder" or not, 2002 was a long time ago, especially online. The site which he was involved with was very different from the one which exists today.
SanjayMehta 2 hours ago [-]
I agree. Wikipedia used to be a useful starting point for almost any research.
Today, not so much. I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an analysis of just one topic where it was shown that circular referencing was used to establish a narrative.
Coming back to the point at hand: the US attorney targeting Wikipedia is merely restating allegations which have been made by many others on Wikipedia’s biases for and against certain topics and individuals.
Loughla 4 hours ago [-]
His argument is that Trump is being criticized more for being controversial than Obama.
Honestly. Is Trump not more controversial than Obama?
hagbard_c 4 hours ago [-]
No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA due to his use of and support for identity politics in a (successful) attempt to win a second period by cobbling together the 'coalition of the oppressed'.
How Trump will end up in the history books wholly depends on whether he succeeds in his attempts to curtail globalism and save the USA from becoming insolvent due to the rising debt. If the economy fails his presidency will as well and with that he'll be remembered for all the controversy around his political career. If he succeeds he'll be seen as a 'realpolitiker' who pulled the USA out of the downward spiral it had been in since ... the late 90's? The end of the cold war?
Of course there is also the chance of a large-scale conflict breaking out during his watch in which case his place in the history books also depends on how that ends.
Time will tell.
Supermancho 4 hours ago [-]
> Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA
That's a fantasy. His mere existence in the position, contradicts the premise. Hillary hoped to be in a similar position...history would have also been kind to her, despite her vicious nature by the obvious virtuous implications (a woman can become POTUS).
anigbrowl 2 hours ago [-]
It's hard to take you seriously when you employ 'democrat' background and Republican as contrasting terms. Referring to the Democratic party and its supporters is more easily effected by saying [the] Democrats. This sort of baity rhetoric undermines any aspirations to objectivity.
habinero 4 hours ago [-]
> partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA
This is just a euphemism for "he was black in public and lesser white people didn't like it".
lurk2 4 hours ago [-]
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
No, that's not accurate. When people talk about the "deterioration of race relations", they're referring to a well-documented phenomenon (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) where poll respondents say race relations are bad (and trending downwards) since 2015 while they were good from 2001 to 2013. I'm skeptical that Obama bears any responsibility for this, given that the trend didn't start until his second term, but it's a real trend and not a euphemism.
techpineapple 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, as described in the blog post, I would imagine the median Fox News viewer to find Wikipedia biased. But the median Fox News viewer is not the median American, much less median world citizen.
But no seriously, having finished reading it, this article is incredibly Christian-centric and Americentric.
Regarding the missing topics mentioned in the article (updated to quote them for convenience):
The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump.
For example, the September 11 attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi objectively happened - few people on the left or right would pretend they did not happen or that were not notable events of Barack Obama’s presidency (as the article discusses).
This is not a matter of whether you watch Fox News or not.
clipsy 4 hours ago [-]
Have you bothered to do any sort of comparison as to how similar attacks are reported? At a quick glance, I see nothing on George W Bush's wiki page[0] about the 2002 consulate attack in Kolkata[1], for example.
How is that remotely similar? There was not a scandal implicating George Bush regarding the Kolkhata attack.
duskwuff 4 hours ago [-]
Not that it's necessarily wrong for it to not be listed there, though. The article on GWB is about him and what he did as president - it isn't meant to be a complete history of the United States between 2001 and 2009.
clipsy 3 hours ago [-]
I agree -- which is also why the absence of Benghazi on Obama's wiki page is not, in my view, a sign of bias.
They creatively censored it under the title “2012 Banghazi Attack”
_DeadFred_ 4 hours ago [-]
The article is nonsense. It links to Obama's Wikipedia page and complains Obama's page doesn't talk about Benghazi. But Obama's Wikipedia page links to a huge article about.... Benghazi. So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page? Weak sauce.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
The article above that we are discussing discusses the omission of the Benghazi attack as an aspect of Barack Obama‘s presidency.
3 hours ago [-]
cogogo 4 hours ago [-]
I actually clicked this link in good faith. Glad to see the downvote I can’t make arrived.
hagbard_c 4 hours ago [-]
Why are you glad for a downvote? Just because you don't agree with Sanger's point of view does not make it less worthwhile to read about it. Censorship is not something to be glad about and yes, downvoting opinions outside of your desired narrative until they are greyed out into oblivion or killed is a form of censorship.
4 hours ago [-]
aingling 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly, he sees the problem clearly. And this article was five years ago. It's become even more entrenched now. There's basically no way of fixing this.
We can see similar problems with other sites that rely on volunteer labor, like Reddit.
hsuduebc2 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Vortigaunt 4 hours ago [-]
"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."
Talking about our march into fascism is still considered off topic here apparently. Isn’t that exactly the sort of topic a supposed forum of hackers ought to be discussing however?
jjulius 4 hours ago [-]
This forum, in spite of the name, was never about the older hacker ethos that began way back when. It was founded by a VC and was called "Startup News" at first, only changing its name six months later. It was created by the wealthy, for those who wanted to get wealthy (and make it's founder wealthier in the process). It co-opted "hacker".
z3c0 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
MathMonkeyMan 4 hours ago [-]
The concern is that it's too easy to contribute to hot political topics. Moderation wants to prevent this forum from becoming identical to so many others, and the only tool available is to deemphasize posts.
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago [-]
That’s an absolutely valid point — it’s important to prevent discussions from devolving into chaotic political battles. But there is a clear limit to how far you can go. When moderation starts suppressing or de-emphasizing information simply because it doesn’t align with a certain viewpoint — even when that information is objectively true — it’s no longer moderation, it’s censorship.
What’s happening around Wikipedia shows how quickly the protection of truth can turn into political pressure: when a platform is accused of "propaganda" simply because its content is inconvenient for certain groups.
I really hope we are not yet at the point where mere disagreement automatically makes someone a propagandist who must be silenced by force.
TZubiri 4 hours ago [-]
Hot political topics are often semi protected anyways.
hsuduebc2 4 hours ago [-]
I fully agree with you. Maybe I wrote it in a bad way. I do not like that these things that are objectively wrong for a functioning democracy are getting flagged because for some reason this got political connotations. I consider it dangerous and I do not understand why this is controversial at all.
xqcgrek2 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
habinero 4 hours ago [-]
Churchs are tax exempt. Are they supposed to be neutral?
dralley 2 hours ago [-]
Yes.
They aren't, and nobody has the political cajones to actually pick that fight. But that doesn't mean that many of them aren't breaking tax laws left and right.
LordGrignard 3 hours ago [-]
well no one said churches should remain tax exempt
miltonlost 4 hours ago [-]
what drift? What do you consider "neutrality"?
sterlind 3 hours ago [-]
the Overton window has shifted sharply Right. if you've shifted along with it, the institutions that haven't shifted at all look like they've moved sharply Left.
Wikipedia hasn't shifted particularly Left since 2020. Centrists are just blind to shifts of the Center. it's the political equivalent of the equivalence principle.
acdha 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
m2f2 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jemmyw 4 hours ago [-]
I had the same thought but most European countries don't have as wide freedom of speech laws as the US. Same problem with moving to Australia or New Zealand, though it'd be awesome to have a project like that based here.
warkdarrior 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cogogo 4 hours ago [-]
Not funny. My family is bilingual english/spanish and my wife is a green card holder but not a citizen. Doesn’t seem far fetched. But if we go down… it won’t be without a fight.
tialaramex 3 hours ago [-]
I recommend fleeing not fighting. Over 100 000 people fled Germany in the 1930s, which might have seemed like an over-reaction, except, well, you know what happened to many of those who didn't.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It's an account created to avoid doxxing myself. My Wikipedia username is easily linked to my main HN account. I still rarely make minor Wikipedia edits now and then, and don't want my account banned.
Anyone who's edited Wikipedia long enough will recognize the pattern of what I'm describing. It's not a misrepresentation.
jay_kyburz 4 hours ago [-]
I would really like to read some concrete examples.
But the Democrats tried to control misinformation during a public health crisis so it goes both ways.
krupan 3 hours ago [-]
It does, but both side's followers are blind to it when their side does it. Or they think it's ok for their side to do it. I'm not sure which is scarier
acdha 3 hours ago [-]
You’re painting with an awfully broad brush, omitting both the magnitude of the difference and far overstating the homogeneity of one of those sides.
yesco 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed, the pandemic authoritarianism was far more invasive, with non-compliance being life ruining for many, so I don't think it's really comparable to the current administrations clownish floundering.
Acting like they are the same shamefully diminishes the previous administrations actions, which is particularly dangerous since their documented suppression of the now widely accepted lab leak theory has resulted in little action to prevent further illegal gain of function research. Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so while this careless research continues without proper safety controls or scrutiny.
acdha 24 minutes ago [-]
You’re not arguing in good faith if you’re not recognizing that the “pandemic authoritarianism” started under Trump, or asserting that the lab leak theory was ever suppressed (it was continuously discussed throughout - just check the comments here for the last 5 years!) or that the most criticized theories making wild claims about bioweapons or gain of function research are now widely accepted. Many assessments have included the possibility of a lab leak of a natural specimen from the beginning, but in the absence of evidence nobody credible is saying more than, say, the CIA’s “low confidence” back in January.
g-b-r 2 hours ago [-]
> Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so
If we do, the absurdities about masks and vaccines that were spread by some will make it last just as long as the covid one
moshegramovsky 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of what you refer to as "pandemic authoritarianism" took place under Trump as well. Vaccine mandates have been part of many jobs for years and years. It's not a Republican or Democrat thing.
archagon 3 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia is not owned by “The Democrats.” Its editors are a pretty diverse and esoteric bunch.
kurtreed2 4 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia is royally f*cked if they come across the following:
Edit: If you had downvoted this comment, please look at what aingling had said here and think about it.
anigbrowl 4 hours ago [-]
A polemic! It must all be true.
Last revised by deleted account 1 month ago
Damn Wikipedia assassinating critics now? Where will it all end
kurtreed2 3 hours ago [-]
> Damn Wikipedia character assassinating critics now
FTFY. If you go dig deeper at foundation.wikimedia.org you'll inevitably come across an Israeli court document describing systemic smear defamation and libel campaign mounted by toxic editors against an academic, which lasted around a decade.
anigbrowl 3 hours ago [-]
You're trying too hard, much like the writer of this polemic.
kurtreed2 52 minutes ago [-]
You should make an account on Wikipediocracy (which is frequented by many Wikipedia editors and insiders) and express all your paeans about Wikipedia's supposed infallibility, and see how fast you'd get dressed-down.
55 minutes ago [-]
citizenkeen 4 hours ago [-]
How do I start worshipping Wikipedia so it can become a church?
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
Wiccanpedia.
sandspar 2 hours ago [-]
Do people genuinely believe that Wikipedia isn't biased? On topics like race, climate, immigration, COVID-19 etc, a fair estimate is that it's about 1 standard deviation left of the median American. It's about as left as NPR.
7373737373 2 hours ago [-]
Are you assuming bias/opinion is one-dimensional and the "median American" stands for the Truth?
sandspar 57 minutes ago [-]
No but thanks for asking.
ks2048 2 hours ago [-]
NPR is left {{Citation needed}} [1]
[1] outside of identity politics
sandspar 58 minutes ago [-]
This will sound rude but I mean it respectfully. If you believe NPR is not left leaning then you are in a severe filter bubble and may want to update your news diet.
ks2048 12 minutes ago [-]
Point taken, but I think my comment is a reflection of the problems with the modern use of "left" and "right".
Yes, of course NPR is more on the side of democrats than republicans.
But, it is very much pro-business, and often pro-war status quo ("right"). And, as I mentioned ("identity politics"), also very much pro-diversity in race/gender/etc. ("left").
rgbrenner 1 hours ago [-]
ok but what’s the crime?
also english wikipedia is actually for english speakers.. so it includes countries that aren’t america. there’s a reason they didn’t name it american wikipedia.
sandspar 57 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I agree there doesn't seem to be a crime. I was addressing the tone of the comment thread.
ks2048 2 hours ago [-]
If the median American thought the Earth was flat, should it treat that as a valid theory?
sandspar 58 minutes ago [-]
If only if were that easy. American politics is mostly fought over interpretations, not simple facts.
firesteelrain 4 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia/Wikimedia could move to a country that allows this type of manipulation on their platform or figure out how to comply with the existing US law.
Wikipedia could also stop operating as a 501c3 and incorporate.
But the typical out for these organizations are that they are not responsible for what people post. I don’t feel like that is very responsible. They already have moderation on the platform.
But Wikimedia/pedia can’t claim 501c3 status. It could spin off the political content/controversial into 501c4 which has more leeway. It can tighten editorial controls, emphasize first amendment, look at Section 230. Publish reports showing how misinformation is identified and corrected, partner with fact checking organizations.
But also if they cannot police their own content without an unpaid army of volunteers then herein lies the bigger issue with their model.
blibble 2 hours ago [-]
or they could move to a country that respects the rule of law and continue operating as they do at present
may I suggest Switzerland
kurtreed2 3 hours ago [-]
Except they have a financial cancer. If the government investigations uncover more scandals, beyond what were found in the Israel-Palestine topic area, public support and goodwill for Wikipedia will evaporate overnight, and they'll have no choice but to liquidate or absorbed into a successor organization.
It sounds weird. Why does it look like a conspiracy theory?
Yo dawg, I heard you like to appeal to conspiracy theory types...
Why would someone introduce lots of seemingly indiscernible edits into important articles, fully knowing that the edit history is available to anyone who wants to look?
It would make more sense to spread propaganda in a place that doesn't fully track it.
Unless the exposition of such tracking edits as an obvious smoking gun exists to be staged to look like someone else did it.
Of course, it could all be to trigger a recursive conspiracytheorypocallipse that further erodes any belief in community generated content.
What should we do, Master Anakin? There's too many of them conspiracies.
tonymet 17 minutes ago [-]
only about 10% of their contributions are needed to run the websites. WMF should have their non-profit status revoked since they are defrauding contributors . They need to restructure and break up the scam into “real Wikipedia” , a legit nonprofit and the scam that consumes 80-90% of contributions.
Rendered at 03:54:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This is getting ridiculous. Is there anyone associated with this administration who does not have a record of promoting Russia's positions?
Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
These things are complicated. Alex Jones and Michio Kaku were both on Genesis for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_Communications_Netwo...
We have the capability of being adults here. Whether we are or not is always a choice.
How many RT TV hits did Larry King do? How recently did King appear on RT?
Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."
I'm not sure who's claiming that here. The RT appearance in question is about him spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda on the eve of Ukraine invasion.
It reads like a cartoon. Everything from China is loaded with secret spyware snooping on you for countless unspecified evils - everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.
I point it out as absurd and reductive whenever I see it and people dogpile on me like I desecrated a sacred cow.
The general election in 2022 had 84,2% of eligible voters in Sweden.
What seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the skill with which American voters have been disenfranchised by partisan forces.
It’s easy to blame people for not voting if you ignore the real difficulties in actually casting a vote for many Americans.
Australia has entered the chat.
The US system was never designed to be fair to individuals in the first place, pointing at it as a failure of democracy is IMHO pulling the actual issues under the rug.
That's not definitive, to be sure. But it's sufficient for me to believe that we did this to ourselves. Now all we can do is figure out how we're going to get through it.
Yes, it might only take a small number of votes in the right place, but either you somehow know the right place, or you have to move a lot of votes.
There's a reasonable discussion to be had along the lines of 'these guys seem to be doing everything they whine about', but could they get a big operation done without a) bragging openly about it, b) leaving a big trail, or c) having a falling out with a conspirator who then tells all.
https://www.youtube.com/live/kdvpXxXVyok?si=XALuK7No9-PLQBAr...
Really need a viable means to fight it, say allowing an elected official's constitutes being able to sue them for no less than $10,000 for incidence of bearing false witness. Help erode the dark money networks.
Also having a 4th branch of Governments, the people with State and Federal binding resolution, would help. Only way to overrides those in power is to unionize the will.
Maybe this is indeed what Russia would do to us. But we're beating them to the punch by doing it to ourselves.
It's like like Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics was a wish list.
Wait til you learn how many have Israeli connections (or even citizenship!).
https://www.propublica.org/article/ed-martin-trump-interim-d...
It's always projection with the MAGA crowd
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.
It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.
Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.
Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.
And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.
There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.
Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view.
Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.
And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross
This is false. The talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_(harassment_cam... lays it out clearly: because of the nature of Gamergate (misogynist harassment campaign), the page about Gamergate is heavily scrutinized in order to make sure that all source cites follow the same reliable-source rules that are in force across all of Wikipedia. Please don't lie about Wikipedia.
Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.
Seems extra “special case” to me.
What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
No claims, no evidence. No sources, except "it has come to my attention" and "information received by my office".
> In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny?
Larry Sanger has been criticizing Wikipedia for more than 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Criticism_of_Wiki...
The author of that letter is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician... - "the first U.S. attorney for D.C. in at least 50 years to be appointed without experience as a judge or a federal prosecutor".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYA9ufivbDw
https://emilygorcenski.com/post/on-truth/
""But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. "
I think wikipedia's approach of centralizing in one place but allowing downloading backups and making all sourcecode and server config public is better. If the worst happens anyone can setup a fork.
IA is at risk too.
There is a long legacy of authoritarian regimes attacking curious places, universities, historians, museums, books or any institution that grounds itself in reality which provides you a way to reasonably criticize authoritarian actions. Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
Wikipedia is absolutely the enemy of this administration and authoritarians everywhere in the world would love to see it's demise or collapse into chaos.
Whether the Wikipedia page for Israel says Gaza is a genocide or not, or that it's an ongoing debate matters. It matters because it influences what people think and therefore what they consent to or what they deem worth fighting for or applying resources to and that goes for just about any issue out there. If you can't read about the suffering that racism has caused, then how bad is racism really? If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
Authority is never legitimate. Those that claim special rights to it because they bring "truth" or "reason" are the most suspect of them all.
> Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
This is a letter not the killing fields.
> It matters because it influences what people think
That people find this a defensible position and believe that just finding the "right editors" or "true guardians" can vouchsafe this poor outcome for humanity is always surprising to me.
Shouldn't people have access to reported information and then come to their own educated conclusions?
> If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
The existence of Wikipedia is a convenience and perhaps not one that should be given tax free status. I think the selected history of labor movements will be just fine.
Even if Wikipedia died tomorrow because of one letter you could still walk into any bookstore in America and buy a book on any subject you want.
Well said.
Hannah Arendt wrote a great book about this, but it sounds like you might have already read it.
The ADL and other Jewish organizations have pointed out that aside from articles about Israel that articles about or mention Jewish topics generally have been editing with disinformation or that made Jews out to be the aggressors.
I agree with you that in order to believe in the ideals of liberal democracy that we must have a core belief in truth. And it's absolutely true that the Trump administration has taken a position that is deeply chilling on the issue of speech. It's clear they want to be the sole arbiters of what "truth" is and they want to use their power to manipulate the reality.
All that said, I cannot as a Jew ignore the fact that Wikipedia is not in itself neutral, and that "more eyes" does not negate systemic bias. What I've seen as a Jew is what the true meaning of marginalized minority is, which is to say that if you are truly a minority and truly marginalized then in a vote of "truth", your reality will be dismissed if it conflicts with the vast majority, and that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population.
While I brought it up, I am not debating the issue of antisemitic bias in Wikipedia[1] as anything other than an illustration of your point of objective truth being true, but also that we can't simply rely on the wisdom of the crowd to materialize that truth.
To preemptively address the issue that's bound to come up when I post this- I'm not arguing that the evils of silencing the entire Wikipedia project are equal to or a fair response to Wikipedia's antisemitic bias. I do believe Wikipedia needs to address its bias problem and that's best done through internal reform.
Two wrongs don't make a right, nor are two wrongs always of equal weight.
[1] Firstly because my point is separate, and secondly because I've encountered the exact issues I've found in Wikipedia elsewhere, which is why I'm sure I'll be voted down.
I'm working on a solution to the effects of this isolation, but it's not ready for a big announcement.
Read it for yourself.
They also position things in such a way that implies antisemitic things, such as saying that Zionism is only 200 years old, or discussing the Israel wars only or primarily through an Arab lens.
These biases around Jewish topics are small individually but large in aggregate, especially in how they present Jews and Jewish topics.
Multiple Jewish and civil rights organizations have done a more comprehensive job at discussing this, even organizations who don't usually agree on things. While they talk about "anti-Israel bias" Wikipedia articles on or mentioning Zionism (80% of Jews are Zionist) are IMHO just as, if not more damaging, and demonstrate the issue.
Most importantly though, talk to the Jews in your life about this. They will tell you.
https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/wikipedia-entrie...
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-846563
https://cameraoncampus.org/blog/seven-tactics-wikipedia-edit...
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
https://www.standwithus.com/post/it-s-time-to-correct-wikipe...
https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would ask that, if you can, try to consider that there are nuances, and that using triggering language does not bring understanding, it only amplifies conflict.
That said, this conversation has been too difficult for me, and I'm not going to engage with you on it further.
I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made.
This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.
Please donate now to show your support. It's time to fight back against this crap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die
[1] "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
If your taxable income was $50,000 and you donate $10,000, and (some other conditions) your taxable income would now be $40,000; same as if you managed to move the money pre-tax.
However. If you donate aprechiated capital assets, you get two benefits. Your taxable income is offset by the value of the asset, and the capital gains disappear. It's much better than selling the asset and donating the proceeds; and it's handy if you don't have good records for your cost basis.
Anyone who's been involved in Wikipedia editing for long enough, especially on divisive topics, knows that this is indeed the case:
"Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material"
Fact is, there are many topics on Wikipedia that follow an editorial line set down by a small group of powerful editors, some of which has even adversely influenced general policy that affects all articles.
This is mostly why I stopped editing. I realized that what I was contributing to - for free - was a project being used to push a particular world view, while purporting to be neutral. And this has become entrenched. That's not something I want any part of, even if I agree with much of that world view myself.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rhododendrites#Don...
Oh shit! That happened already, didn't it? How is it going at attracting talented individuals?
We should remember that anti-wikipedia propaganda exists for decades now. Despite of that, it is a place cherished by many (including non commies). Its demise would be a public disaster.
Hoarders will maintain copies of it. And if there is bias, there will be tons of biased bootlegs around.
Further investigation would be more wise than rapid decisions by instinct.
I can’t read the WP article because it’s paywalled, however I have been suspicious of Wikimedia for a long time. I used to donate to them thinking I was helping to keep the severs running, then being alarmed to find the money was going on all sorts of nonsense. The former CEO (Maher) was blatantly a political/intelligence operator. Fits the pattern of the establishment/powers-that-be abusing the NGO/non-profit sector to illicitly further their aims, so I’m not surprised the new DoJ are looking into them.
I would also note that the last straw for companies like Parler was involvement in a violent attempt to overthrow the government whereas in this case the objection appears to be constitutionally-protected speech. Again, those are nowhere near comparable situations. Where is something like, say, going after a right-wing non-profit because they published content which criticized Biden?
You guys control the servers, if anything you have the psyop advantage.
However, the librarians are very vocal about self determination and keeping wikimedia out of important decisions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/health/nejm-prosecutor-le...
It was bad enough with 2001, 2008, and 2020. But this is next level.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
Can you walk me through how you see this playing out, step-by-step?
I want to believe!
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
You've cherry-picked a few bogeymen.
What about Norman Borlaug, Bell Laboratories, the Gates Foundation, Margaret Sanger and the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology?
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/winred.com?stars=1
It turns out the name of the political donation game is recurring donations and spammy messages. I 100% believe people donated to some random cause via act blue and didn’t realize they were signing up for recurring donations through there —- like all political fundraising arms do as evidenced by all the people complaining that WinRed incessantly removes money from their account that they didn’t authorize. But again, only 1 of the 2 is being investigated and it’s obviously a corrupt investigation so here we are.
That doesn’t mean that random people who don’t know who an organisation is should be giving political donations to that organisation.
In short, your logical fallacy is: whataboutism
——
Edit for Fauntleroy below due to rate limit:
No. The only thing I have discussed is the accusations against actblue, which I did not bring up. I have bought up no other topics.
—-
Edit for deadfred: hence asking about if anyone is alleging identical behaviour from WinRed earlier. From what I have seen, they are not.
Edit 2 for deadfred: "You narrowed to ActBlue" no I did not. mikeyouse bought ActBlue up. "there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue" yes there is - either they did what they are being accused or they did not.
Edit in response: The broader conversation is about weaponizing government power against political opponents, ActBlue was just one example give in many being discussed. You narrowed to ActBlue to have something you felt you could condemn safely, while ignoring the larger pattern. That selective focus is the weaponization your argument is trying to distract from.
Edit: Stepping back and noting the pattern there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue. Especially when this VERY administration is blatantly selling access with their shill coin. Your hyper focus is a weaponized distraction, a 'gotcha' from the larger discussion. The administration does not care about corruption in fundraising, they care about targeting their opposition and shutting down any influence they have via fundraising, via information/knowledge sharing on the web, via universities with students willing to challenge the status quo.
Are you organizing a brigade offsite?
Power corrupts...
> We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?
You can't love the web without loving Wikipedia, so I'm wary of anyone who disrespects it.
I just feel that logically this doesn't make any sense. Having the view or even promoting the idea that a mythical creature is "gender fluid" isn't an overt political action. It doesn't help any political party or politician. There are numerous fully-compliant tax-exempt organizations that directly aid LGBTQIA+ individuals. How are these above board but having someone submit content to your organization that claims the Nure-onna might be genderfluid is crossing into the realm of politics by influencing election outcomes?
“ Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/ ⓘ;[1] born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
Regardless - whether you choose to describe Sanger's early involvement with Wikipedia as a "founder" or not, 2002 was a long time ago, especially online. The site which he was involved with was very different from the one which exists today.
Today, not so much. I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an analysis of just one topic where it was shown that circular referencing was used to establish a narrative.
Coming back to the point at hand: the US attorney targeting Wikipedia is merely restating allegations which have been made by many others on Wikipedia’s biases for and against certain topics and individuals.
Honestly. Is Trump not more controversial than Obama?
How Trump will end up in the history books wholly depends on whether he succeeds in his attempts to curtail globalism and save the USA from becoming insolvent due to the rising debt. If the economy fails his presidency will as well and with that he'll be remembered for all the controversy around his political career. If he succeeds he'll be seen as a 'realpolitiker' who pulled the USA out of the downward spiral it had been in since ... the late 90's? The end of the cold war?
Of course there is also the chance of a large-scale conflict breaking out during his watch in which case his place in the history books also depends on how that ends.
Time will tell.
That's a fantasy. His mere existence in the position, contradicts the premise. Hillary hoped to be in a similar position...history would have also been kind to her, despite her vicious nature by the obvious virtuous implications (a woman can become POTUS).
This is just a euphemism for "he was black in public and lesser white people didn't like it".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But no seriously, having finished reading it, this article is incredibly Christian-centric and Americentric.
This is not a matter of whether you watch Fox News or not.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_attack_on_American_cultur...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack
They creatively censored it under the title “2012 Banghazi Attack”
We can see similar problems with other sites that rely on volunteer labor, like Reddit.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
They aren't, and nobody has the political cajones to actually pick that fight. But that doesn't mean that many of them aren't breaking tax laws left and right.
Wikipedia hasn't shifted particularly Left since 2020. Centrists are just blind to shifts of the Center. it's the political equivalent of the equivalence principle.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anyone who's edited Wikipedia long enough will recognize the pattern of what I'm describing. It's not a misrepresentation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchWikipediaDie/wiki/scandals
Acting like they are the same shamefully diminishes the previous administrations actions, which is particularly dangerous since their documented suppression of the now widely accepted lab leak theory has resulted in little action to prevent further illegal gain of function research. Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so while this careless research continues without proper safety controls or scrutiny.
If we do, the absurdities about masks and vaccines that were spread by some will make it last just as long as the covid one
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchWikipediaDie/wiki/scandals
Edit: If you had downvoted this comment, please look at what aingling had said here and think about it.
Last revised by deleted account 1 month ago
Damn Wikipedia assassinating critics now? Where will it all end
FTFY. If you go dig deeper at foundation.wikimedia.org you'll inevitably come across an Israeli court document describing systemic smear defamation and libel campaign mounted by toxic editors against an academic, which lasted around a decade.
[1] outside of identity politics
Yes, of course NPR is more on the side of democrats than republicans.
But, it is very much pro-business, and often pro-war status quo ("right"). And, as I mentioned ("identity politics"), also very much pro-diversity in race/gender/etc. ("left").
also english wikipedia is actually for english speakers.. so it includes countries that aren’t america. there’s a reason they didn’t name it american wikipedia.
Wikipedia could also stop operating as a 501c3 and incorporate.
But the typical out for these organizations are that they are not responsible for what people post. I don’t feel like that is very responsible. They already have moderation on the platform.
But Wikimedia/pedia can’t claim 501c3 status. It could spin off the political content/controversial into 501c4 which has more leeway. It can tighten editorial controls, emphasize first amendment, look at Section 230. Publish reports showing how misinformation is identified and corrected, partner with fact checking organizations.
But also if they cannot police their own content without an unpaid army of volunteers then herein lies the bigger issue with their model.
may I suggest Switzerland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER
Yo dawg, I heard you like to appeal to conspiracy theory types...
Why would someone introduce lots of seemingly indiscernible edits into important articles, fully knowing that the edit history is available to anyone who wants to look?
It would make more sense to spread propaganda in a place that doesn't fully track it.
Unless the exposition of such tracking edits as an obvious smoking gun exists to be staged to look like someone else did it.
Of course, it could all be to trigger a recursive conspiracytheorypocallipse that further erodes any belief in community generated content.
What should we do, Master Anakin? There's too many of them conspiracies.