Today 01:54 AM
(This post was last modified: Today 02:09 AM by C C.)
Heh. Back in the earlier days, Wikipedia was criticized by the establishment itself for being a low-grade and unreliable reference source. Now many of its sectors have acquired dependence upon its existence.
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INTRO: Who controls what you're allowed to believe? Ashley Rindsberg on Wikipedia, Google, AI Bias & the hidden information war.
JILLIAN MICHAELS
https://youtu.be/9ojAtc-HScc
VIDEO EXCERPTS: How did you even get into this? You're an investigative journalist. What made you decide to start investigating Wikipedia? It was really kind of a coincidence. I was working with someone a really great researcher [...] It was a study about Wikipedia bias, and the results showed that there's a clear bias towards the left.
So if you take left-wing American politicians, Supreme Court justices, even journalists that are mentioned on Wikipedia... They tend to be associated with more favorable language on the platform. And on the right, you garner the opposite effect. People on the right tend to be associated with negative terms and negative sentiment on Wikipedia.
I was like, okay, we all have a kind of gut sense that that's the case. But why? That's what I wanted to understand. How did it get to that point? How does it work? And what does it mean for the bigger information ecosystem?
[...] It's the entire information ecosystem. It's what feeds Google results. And most important of all, it's what feeds AI disproportionately, more so than any other single knowledge platform. The AIs that we are relying on today get their training from the training data from Wikipedia and their reference data.
[...] So on Trump, for example, I did some reporting about how a small cluster of editors on the platform worked to cast Trump as an authoritarian, which is a very extreme claim to make about an American president, even one you may really really dislike.
To call him an authoritarian in an encyclopedia, they're not expressing an opinion on X or Instagram. These editors relied on Marxist sourcing, far-left hard-left sources, sources that were working with former Obama officials... They launder it through Wikipedia. So, you as the user of the site don't really know where the information is coming from. You just get this blank statement.
Then you go over to an entry like the supreme leader of Iran at the time or Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China, and you don't see the term authoritarian. They call Trump an authoritarian but not an actual authoritarian. This is just one example.
In the Iranian stuff, we have systematic infiltration by the Iranian state media IRGC. These are terror supporters. The biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Wikipedia relies on their data, on their information, to prove facts about what you, as a consumer in the United States, are learning about the world. We see the same thing with China. We see the same thing even with al-Qaeda media being cited as sources on Wikipedia. It goes on and on and on. The more you dig, the more you find.
[...] MICHAELS: Oh, my Wikipedia page a decade ago. I started to notice it taking a very bizarre turn when it came to my reputation. My business partner and I would struggle to try to clean up the page, and we would find it impossible. That it had been likely completely commandeered.
But the part where this is relevant, and not just my personal sour grapes, is at the time I was working with the Clinton Foundation. Literally working directly with the Clintons in the Clinton Global Initiative with their health matters program. And their people were like, "Oh yeah, no problem. We can lock the page." And they locked my page for a long time. so that nobody could mess with it.
And I never thought anything of it until now. So, let's go back to the beginning. How did this start? Was this originally intended to be a propaganda machine utilized by bad actors?
He investigated Wikipedia for years ... https://youtu.be/9ojAtc-HScc
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9ojAtc-HScc
- - - - - - - - -
INTRO: Who controls what you're allowed to believe? Ashley Rindsberg on Wikipedia, Google, AI Bias & the hidden information war.
JILLIAN MICHAELS
https://youtu.be/9ojAtc-HScc
VIDEO EXCERPTS: How did you even get into this? You're an investigative journalist. What made you decide to start investigating Wikipedia? It was really kind of a coincidence. I was working with someone a really great researcher [...] It was a study about Wikipedia bias, and the results showed that there's a clear bias towards the left.
So if you take left-wing American politicians, Supreme Court justices, even journalists that are mentioned on Wikipedia... They tend to be associated with more favorable language on the platform. And on the right, you garner the opposite effect. People on the right tend to be associated with negative terms and negative sentiment on Wikipedia.
I was like, okay, we all have a kind of gut sense that that's the case. But why? That's what I wanted to understand. How did it get to that point? How does it work? And what does it mean for the bigger information ecosystem?
[...] It's the entire information ecosystem. It's what feeds Google results. And most important of all, it's what feeds AI disproportionately, more so than any other single knowledge platform. The AIs that we are relying on today get their training from the training data from Wikipedia and their reference data.
[...] So on Trump, for example, I did some reporting about how a small cluster of editors on the platform worked to cast Trump as an authoritarian, which is a very extreme claim to make about an American president, even one you may really really dislike.
To call him an authoritarian in an encyclopedia, they're not expressing an opinion on X or Instagram. These editors relied on Marxist sourcing, far-left hard-left sources, sources that were working with former Obama officials... They launder it through Wikipedia. So, you as the user of the site don't really know where the information is coming from. You just get this blank statement.
Then you go over to an entry like the supreme leader of Iran at the time or Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China, and you don't see the term authoritarian. They call Trump an authoritarian but not an actual authoritarian. This is just one example.
In the Iranian stuff, we have systematic infiltration by the Iranian state media IRGC. These are terror supporters. The biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Wikipedia relies on their data, on their information, to prove facts about what you, as a consumer in the United States, are learning about the world. We see the same thing with China. We see the same thing even with al-Qaeda media being cited as sources on Wikipedia. It goes on and on and on. The more you dig, the more you find.
[...] MICHAELS: Oh, my Wikipedia page a decade ago. I started to notice it taking a very bizarre turn when it came to my reputation. My business partner and I would struggle to try to clean up the page, and we would find it impossible. That it had been likely completely commandeered.
But the part where this is relevant, and not just my personal sour grapes, is at the time I was working with the Clinton Foundation. Literally working directly with the Clintons in the Clinton Global Initiative with their health matters program. And their people were like, "Oh yeah, no problem. We can lock the page." And they locked my page for a long time. so that nobody could mess with it.
And I never thought anything of it until now. So, let's go back to the beginning. How did this start? Was this originally intended to be a propaganda machine utilized by bad actors?
He investigated Wikipedia for years ... https://youtu.be/9ojAtc-HScc