He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
And his name is Elon Musk
I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.
Who hates Wikipedia:
- Tech bros
- Russia
- Israel
- Other generic fascists
There is a Russianfork.
what of the teachers that say not to use it?
They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.
Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.
Who hates Wikipedia:
Russia
Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.
Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.
Look no further than wikipedia to provide that information haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_pages_banned_in_Russia
Hardly unique to Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_of_Wikipedia
And hardly exhaustive, either. The “people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia” includes two high profile cases of Saudi citizens, yet there’s no “Pages Banned by Saudi Arabia” when there obviously should be.
Hell, even the site’s own founding members have come at Wikipedia on its own terms, with Larry Sanger reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for distributing child pornography. For some reason, I never see “Larry Sanger” listed explicitly as an enemy of Wikipedia with the frequency I see Vladimir Putin indicted.
I mistakenly replied to the wrong post (I was in a hurry). There is a fork of Wikipedia that is “Kremlin friendly” called Ruwiki.
Maybe because the list of things Larry Sanger has done against Wikipedia is much, much shorter than Putin?
State actors often pose as normal editors on wikipedia, in order to try and cover for things they do. Corporations often do the same thing, via their PR firms.
Its pretty well documented on the WP logs.
I’m not super involved, but I believe it’s possible to engage with Wikipedia ethically and well as a PR firm or the like. But being honest is part one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PR_Professionals_%26_Editing
It is possible, but very rarely done. Because 99% of a PR or state actor intel group’s job is lying to the public. Because if all you needed was the truth, they wouldn’t have a job.
A bunch of these state actors are western politicians and their staff/campaigns, though.
The Evil Slavic Menace isn’t out there scrubbing pages for a bunch of state legislators, MPs, and judicial appointees. That’s just the goons of the local political parties.
It’s not even remotely isolated to “Western politicians”… I spent 4 months battling on a few articles, and it turns out, I wasted many hours with a troll farm ran by the CCP…
I’ve also wasted many hours on reps from the Church of Scientology, NY State Police, SCO Group, the GOP of Arkansas, and the Dem Committee in Nevada.
Any state or corporation you can think of has been trying to attack WP like this.
Correct. The Evil Slavic Menace is banning it outright, instead.
By Zachapertio - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153366379
No its true actually. Vladimir (the impaler) Putin and President Xi got together and had a secret meeting all about how Wikipedia is the greatest threat to their total dictatorship of Earth, because its the only thing keeping the American citizens so free and open minded and a place where people can go to learn about forbidden topics like Tank Girl and Winnie the Pooh. Putin got mad because he read the article about Grizzly bears and it said he’d probably die if he tried to wrestle one, so he spun up his special government botnet from his elite hacker force and activated his army of Tankie sleeper agents on Lemmy to make an attack on the Freedom of Information Act (thats a special law that Biden made to try to protect wikipedia and keep free speech safe).
this is a joke about foreign influence on Lemmy, not about Wikipedia itself. I like wikipedia
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I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I do think they’re a good STARTING POINT for research, the problem comes when it’s used as the end-all be-all
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Can you be specific about this misinformation so I don’t just point fingers at anyone who doesn’t worship the ground Wikipedia walks on. Like what are they saying and why isn’t it true?
Quoting myself from elsewhere:
This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million “excess” went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn’t be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like “bleeding the foundation dry” or “all while content is created by volunteers.”
You can look through my profile to see the exchanges where people say all of those things and then I respond, if you want to see in depth where and how people are saying it, and my arguments for why it isn’t true.
I had heard a long time ago that Wikipedia donations are largely useless and haven’t actually gone to anything but profits in awhile. That second part however is demonstrably false with Wikipedia one of the few information outlets that CORRECTLY label Israel’s actions as genoicde.
Their financial statements are public: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
There’s no profit, since they are a nonprofit. They have a couple of years’ operating expenses saved up, which is nice. They’ve been giving away a lot of it to various research projects, and they pay everyone a comfortable salary, which is also nice. People in the comments have been assuring me that this is a sign that they’re incredibly corrupt, for example describing the research project thing as a bad thing (sponsoring “weird” research) or saying it’s a problem that they paid the CEO around $700k in one year.
Actually, they started out with the earlier claims like that they were friendly with fascists or that $300M went missing every year, and then only switched over to “their financials are good and they pay salaries, and that’s a problem, all they should need to pay is hosting” once all the earlier stuff failed to hit. It doesn’t sound like they’re hurting for money, but maybe being aggressive about soliciting donations is the reason they’re not hurting for money. They don’t get substantial income from anything other than donations, it looks like. But yes, if you wanted to support a project that really needs it, maybe the Internet Archive is a better place to start.
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I’m pretty sure it’s Elon.
There are a shocking number of Elmo simps.
And bots
As long as people keep in mind what Wikipedia is, there should be no issue. There’s a reason teachers never allow it as a source, but it is great as an introduction to any topic, from which point you can further your own research.
The entire 485 word intro to his Wikipedia page is unsourced:
There’s a Forbes source on his wealth.
time to edit that then
DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.
WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)
Do download a copy of Wikipedia but give them some credit. This isn’t the first nor last attack on information freedom (see internet archive)
NO NO CREDIT GIVEN MUST SHOUT
lol, no it won’t….
Can I get a TLDR. I’m on the page about downloading it, but there are so many files to download which makes me think I am looking at the wrong stuff.
Wikipedia is pretty large now, even for text only versions. So the most recommended option to download/read an offline version is by using “Kiwix”.
Kiwix is a reader designed to open and operate archived websites like Wikipedia that are stored in a .zim (think z-file compression but for websites).
Kiwix is open sourced and readers can be installed on your pc, phones, self-hosted as a website, etc.
You can check out their Kiwix library for a list of curated zim’s beyond Wikipedia that are updated on a schedule
You can also use their zimit tool to archive websites on your own as well.
It took a day for me to grasp all these concepts since they were designed mostly for Wikipedia archival purposes but it’s amazing how robust the tools and community are.
I consider myself pretty savvy but I’m also at a loss. I thought and still think you can download all the text but there are so many readers there, different file types. When I finally got to some raw data it was from 2008.
If you want to use Kiwix as posted by @ChogChog@lemmy.world above, you can find the data here: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/kiwix/zim/wikipedia/
The latest (January 2024) total dump for Wikipedia (English) is:
wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim…but there’s other languages and sizes available as well.
“the page”? Do you mean kiwix?
People posting misinformation? On Lemmy? No. It can’t be.
People posting misinformation? On
Lemmythe Internet? No. It can’t be.👍👍
Misinformation… you mean lies?
You can use true statements to spread misinformation, I guess.
How does that work?
Information without context can create a different narrative than that same information with context.
You see this in racially biased crime reporting. Without context, you see that one demographic is disproportionately prone to being arrested and convicted of crimes. The conclusion being aimed for is the expected racist one.
With context, you see that criminality is roughly equally distributed, but that certain classes of crime are enforced with prison more often, that different demographics get disproportionately more attention from law enforcement, and that due to socioeconomic factors different demographics are more likely to inhabit income brackets where the likely types of crime are more likely to be harshly enforced.Information without context can be misleading. If someone seems to care about the conclusion you take away more than some bit of context that makes that conclusion less forgone, thats a sign they might be pushing a narrative.
There is, unfortunately, a contrasting rhetorical trick where someone provides such an overwhelming amount of context that you cannot possibly handle all of it in a reasonable amount of time.
Exactly where the line is is unfortunately not something I think there’s a simple answer for determining. I try to determine if it seems like the person is using the information to support their point, or if they’re using it to drown out opposition.
Things like “lies of omission” basically.
The best propaganda is built on a foundation of truth. You’ll see this on fascist websites that love to flood their feeds with “black on black crime” stories, to heavily promote “white woman attacked by black man” news narratives, and to repeatedly post images of young black/latino men with facial tattoos or in mug-shot photos. Any individual statement can be validated as true, but deliberate miss-sampling of information leads the audience to develop broad negative biases towards certain demographics.
Then you get a drum-beat of assertions about skin color as a heuristic for public safety. People are asserted as dangerous because of their skin color and you need to be proactive in keeping yourselves away from these people through… white flight and neighborhood gentrification, panicked public responses to black people, reporting black people in your neighborhood to the police as “suspicious”, leaning towards prosecution/high sentencing of black suspects when you’re a member of a jury pool, organizing with your neighbors to harass and expel black neighbors, pressure your school/local community center to hold back/suspend/expel black students disproportionately, and otherwise make your community hostile to black residents until you get a segregated neighborhood through public pressure.
The combination of the cherry-picked information and the advocacy for populist segregation leads to more interracial conflicts and an increased anxiety between white and black residents. This sets off a wave of self-confirming incidents - you get to see more black people in your neighborhood punished by authority figures, which leads naive viewers to believe more of the “minorities are inherently evil” media narratives. More conflicts feed into the social media scene of cherry-picked video clips and biased news articles, with “innocent white person victimized by evil black person” becoming received wisdom rather than something you need to read in a headline anymore.
People are trained into becoming racist over time by the engineered social dynamics.
In addition to what frazorth said, you can change how a statement is interpreted by simply using a passive voice. Compare “Alice was hit by Bob” to “Bob hit Alice”. Both statements are identical, but the former is a lot less accusatory towards Bob. This technique is used when reporting about Police abuse, or about how the civilians in Gaza are treated.
“I make more money than last year” when i make lwss inflation-adjusted
“we have reached record incomes” when you make more money than ever but still less than you should (i.e. your competitor went bankrupt and you failed to capture their customer-base)
It’s all about the 💫Framing🌟
You probably have more than the average amount of legs too.
That comment is very mean
tap for explanation
Because it’s the mean average
You’ve never heard of people bending the truth?
Saying something factually correct, but misleading because parts are omitted?
Lying by omission is still a lie.
Misleading by omission is deception
Misinformation and lies are only separated by intent.
I heard the guy who wrote Lemmy ate a GMO tomato, and enjoyed it.
I don’t understand, all tomatoes have been gmo since the chemtrails started appearing in the fall of 52
There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.
The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.
it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing
Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.
Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.
The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.
They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc.
That’s not even new.
Dismissively saying “OK boomer” has been around for several years.
Not the same.
I mean actively blaming specific generations for political and financial issues. Yeah, we blame the boomers for a lot, but now the complainers are shifting focus.
The politically elite are so used to puppeteering public sentiment with ease, and so confident in their efforts to suppress education in America that they have stopped trying to be sneaky. All American ‘news’ is propaganda and the this is a blatant attempt to divide the public on one of the last free resources for factual information**. Free as in non-criminalized. These types of posts by EM are to incite division in order to amp-up for the criminalization of information. And it’s not very difficult to see.
**factual when readers uphold its integrity through critical consumption and editing.
The ability to control the narrative of public discourse is one of the first things that needs to dismantled. The propaganda machine and it’s made up culture war/distraction needs to go.
And the fact that it’s escalated to the point of wealthy elites trying to dismantle public access to information should be deeply alarming for all of us… because then all we have for information is what they tell us… and that’s a dystopia i have no intention of experiencing.
Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.
On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.
Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.
Thinking of the most recent so-called “far left” thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There’s a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there’s something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that’s typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you’re in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.
Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.
Horseshoe theory doesn’t fit-- it’s stethoscope theory
Yeah that’s just horseshoe theory with extra steps and gymnastics to be able to say that far left is okay, really, they never do anything wrong, trust me!
Unless they do as tankies ARE the far left
Do you do yoga? Because that is quite the stretch
It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.
In this case it’s not so much horseshoe theory as it is that most tankies on lemmy are just trolls, or teenagers parroting trolls.
Yeah, far right says the same and I’m not buying it from them either
Lemmy is too small to be a worthwhile target for musk-like campaigns. It’s usually just people escaping their echo chambers to get their rage fix. If you’re able to think for yourself, there’s really no negative impact and scrolling past is a great solution.
It’s not and if anything the fact it’s small has advantages. Small is easier to turn into an echo chamber.
If you can push bullshit onto a small but passionate group of people online they’ll do all the hard work for you. They’ll recruit, polish/tailor the message for other audiences, and spread it across the wider internet.
And we know it works, because that’s exactly how the whole “Q-anon” thing operated. Some vague, crazy bullshit on an obscure imageboard became a nearly mainstream “movement”.
