In light of the recent FarceBook purging of political websites (most notably anti-police and anti-capitalist, as well as RW ones) this story shook me too.

We've been carefully conditioned, to the point that these companies have had verbs added to their names as part of the new vernacular ("just Google it"; hey,"Just Say No"), into accepting that a new age of information has been ushered in for our edification alone. But what we're living through is really more of a deceptive dystopian epoch in which we've been trained to believe that sites like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia contain and are the arbiters of all known fact and knowledge of all human history. With the corollary being there's not much need anymore for books, scholarly research, fact-checking, sources, accountable editors, etc. All distilled down into the most prominently displayed search entry for online information: the ubiquitous Wikipedia entry, which will likely be one of the very first things one will see.

We've been trained to believe Social Media and Big Tech will do it all for us. Our phones already do most everything for us now, so in keeping with that just leave it to us, they implicitly say, to let your fingertips bring every whim of curiosity into focus and every thing to your doorstep (thanks Amazon, drone shipping soon?). They're now unavoidable and omnipresent throughout our day, all delivered with bedazzling bells and whistles. After all, we're Americans, goddamnit. It's our god-given right as citizens of the Greatest Country on Earth to be entertained and have the utmost convenience 24/7.

Pluto's Republic and some others here have been in the vanguard about this, stating correctly that the CIA and Corporate America, to name a few, have had a large hand in using Wikipedia to delete unfavorable criticism and to catapult the propaganda, to use a Jimmy Dore phrase. I wasn't aware of the breadth of it until now.

Gary Null, a renaissance man who hosts a show on WBAI in NYC, has been going on for months now about how Wiki is allowing repeated falsehoods to be published about him. So much so that I began to think he might have been overtaken by paranoia. Now I feel ashamed that I even ever so slightly doubted this guy who has dedicated his life to helping people and exposing corruption. Powerful forces (in his case, most probably Big Pharma and gov't operations) are devoting lots of energy and money to marginalize and defame his open message of teaching how to self-heal and for his probing, dissident voice on political and media corruption.

Chris Hedges had an eye-opening show about what's really going on behind the scenes with Wikipedia.

From the video description:

"On the latest episode of On Contact, investigative journalist Helen Buyniski exposes Jimmy Wales' egalitarian Wikipedia as yet another tool of the ruling elite."

The show's intro:

Buyniski: "It would be one thing if it was just considered a biased source, like just a sort of trash rag, like the bathroom wall of the internet, as I like to call it. But it's not. It's considered this sort of Holy Oracle of Truth and it's really anything but."

Hedges: "Wikipedia has become an online source for instant information about personalities, politics, conflicts, countries, and the array of contemporary and historical events that define our culture. But this online source is very different from the highly researched and scholarly entries in the old printed encyclopedias or academic journals that once graced library shelves.

Its contributors and editors who are largely anonymous are not required to demonstrate any expertise in the subjects they write about and edit. They are often unpaid. There are those who bear grudges or champion particular ideologies and conspiracy theories, along with big business that closely monitors and edits all that appears about its products and business dealings that have turned Wikipedia into a platform for propaganda. Nowhere is this more evident than the way Wikipedia treats left-wing anti-capitalist critics such as the British MP George Galloway, along with journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh."

She gives an explanation about how Wikipedia is supposed to function and how it really functions. At one point in 2007 at its peak it had 100k volunteer users, contributors and editors. Then a hierarchy took over vying for power in a byzantine process. Eight years later it dropped to 40% of that who were making all the edits. It was then reported that 1% of its users made 77% of the total edits.

Editors are now selling their services. There's a "notability" requirement too. Wiki PR began advertising their services.

In Aug of 2007 it was discovered that "computers at CIA headquarters had been used to make edits to entries on the US invasion of Iraq and the biographies of former CIA head William Colby, and former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. An FBI computer had also been used to edit the entry on the US as Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Voting machine
manufacturer Diebold was caught deleting 15 paragraphs critical of its product; while the Vatican and the British Labour Party were also prolific editors. Since then the intelligence agencies have had to camouflage their edits or outsource them to third parties." Which is easy to do.

Hedges notes that a critic named Philip Cross made 14 edits to his Wiki page, but also goes after figures like Galloway and Corbyn. This is a single person who has made 130,000 edits to more than 30,000 pages - all of them defaming LW, anti-capitalist, progressive critics.

At the same time, there appeared to be "a very clear intent on the part of the managers of Wikipedia to prop up other figures, such as Hillary Clinton." Buyniski says "she was the beneficiary of probably the most obvious Wikipedia PR campaign that was coming straight from the top. I mean, (Wikipedia) hired the Clinton Foundation's PR firm the Minassian group." This would be the "non-profit" arm called WikiMedia, which is worth about $75 million in donations, which used to come from users, but now are mostly from large corporations and governments. Sounds like Pay-To-Play to me, just like the Clinton Foundation and its bribery money collected the world over and then used as a slush fund, according to CF honcho Doug Band's #PodestEmails.

So, add Wikipedia to the list of social media companies who colluded unsuccessfully to get HRC elected President. They join Google, Facebook, Twitter and practically the entire MSM. Can we just pause a moment to marvel at what a downright horrendous, untrustworthy and entitled candidate that pathetic human being was/is, who couldn't beat the Orange Buffoon (or as Roger Daltrey said of the election, "even a dead dog could have won")? #NeverForget

The propaganda churns on.

The NYPD was found to have made hundreds of edits from their computers, incredibly covering up the biggest, evil scandals including the police murder of Eric Garner and then Sean Bell, the latter on grounds that it wasn't "notable." Sean Bell was an unarmed young black man who on the eve of his wedding was shot dozens of times by cops. They were also caught falsifying and softening up their image for the egregious, civil rights-violating overstep of the controversial and ignominously racist Stop & Frisk tactic of a failed Broken Windows theory.

There's more. Watch the whole interview.

I don't use Google at all anymore. Or Facebook. To me they've shown their faces long ago to be data mining traps that crunch all of our seemingly frivolous personal stories and comments into highly contextualized information to be sold to third party marketers, as well as add to the massive surveillance tools of the State (in addition to compiling data one has willingly given up that may be used against against oneself in a court of law, medical case, etc).

I just use DuckDuckGo for searches, and Twitter to keep up with current stories, to voice some opinions and keep up with investigative journalists, authors and activists I like. Don't know how much DDG keeps my search info private or how much is dependent on outsourcing Google's data gathering, but I'm not directly going to use Google for anything anymore(including maps, if I can help it, which is almost all of the time). Though of course, as Assange has said, if you carry a smartphone on your person you are completely detectable at all times by it, no matter if you turn off its GPS.

The propaganda just gets worse and worse, more concealed and insidious, as the surveillance just increases and encroaches, than we could have ever imagined.

Maybe there's a project in it for us here. For those who have the time checking the entries of history we know to be true that is being re-written, candidates' backgrounds and radical alternative websites' descriptions, etc.

Let's start keeping an eye on the ones of whom we're at least aware. And let's be a lot more careful when sourcing Wikipedia, folks.