Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger says the U.S. intelligence agencies have hijacked the online encyclopedia he helped create and are using it for “information warfare.”
In a recent interview with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, Sanger said that from approximately 2010 to 2015 he noticed that Wikipedia articles became “obviously biased,” adding that “it really got over the top” between 2013 and 2018.
“We do have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” Sanger said. “Do you think they stopped doing that back then?”
By the time former President Donald Trump took office, the alleged bias had intensified and Sanger said that “no encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.”
A frequent critic of the site’s leftward leanings, Sanger said that the “deeper explanation” is that “the left very, very deliberately seeks out to take control.”
The Wikipedia co-founder went on to say that “intelligence now, a great part of intelligence — information warfare is conducted online,” and where, he questioned, “if not on websites like Wikipedia?”
“They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas — which they’re already mostly in line with — or they just develop their own talent within the community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger said.
The original idea of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia that could be accessed for free by everyone and would not be partisan in tone.
“One of the most important features of a credible encyclopedia was that you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an article was written by a Democrat or a Republican,” Sanger said. “Generally speaking, you should present the information that a person would need in order to make up his own mind about issues of controversy.”
“Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way,” he added.
This isn’t the first time Sanger has criticized the site he helped found. In 2021, Sanger told Tucker Carlson he was embarrassed about helping create it because the original neutrality policy had been abandoned.
Nicole Wells ✉
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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