Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-11-28/Disinformation report
Missed and Dissed
It's hardly controversial to note that the government of a certain country has had a troubling history of being involved with
More to the point: do you think the United States
Stephen Harrison answers "no", in his (aptly-titled) Slate article No, Wikipedia Is Not Colluding With DHS. He responds to claims from various online raconteurs on Twitter that the United States
But what was the whole deal of it? Well, the specific claims Harrison addresses from Twitter loudmouths are based on much broader claims (and implications) from
“ | Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election. | ” |
One has to admit that this sounds pretty disconcerting, but a trained eye can see some cracks in the concrete. First of all, Wikipedia isn't a "tech company", it's an encyclopedia, hosted on a website where all the discussions are public. I sure as hell didn't see
This brings us to the second thing, which is the crux of it all – few understand this – the WMF is not in charge of editing articles. It is true that they often "tackle" something, "assign a team" to something, or "investigate" something, but they do not "edit articles" except under
Yes, it is true that they put out an enormous report about tackling disinformation during the 2020 election. And it is true that this report contains a bunch of broad gesturing to the effect that they took a bunch of direct actions. But here, you can again read between the lines, and see that they were borrowing a shoulder for the tackle, so to speak: "Security and T&S, once it hit their radars respectively, moved quickly in trying to identify and coordinate resolutions". Coordinate resolutions? That's not editing! They sent a bunch of emails, to volunteer editors, telling them that someone was trying to dick around with Wikipedia, which is
I mean, look at this: "T&S needed some time to find an active steward on IRC". What kind of lousy COINTELPRO operation would need to sit around twiddling its thumbs while waiting for some random unpaid hobbyist to tab over to irssi?
Now, why the WMF has such a penchant for exaggerating their role in political editing, and for making their own activities sound creepy – like offering recommendations about a "Content Oversight Committee" to issue binding decisions about "harmful content" – is hard to understand. And, indeed, much has been written about the troubling recent phenomenon where vague, protean categories of harmful information are being increasingly "tackled", "addressed" and "investigated" by vague, protean organizations and consortia. However, in this instance, it would seem that Bernie Madoff did not steal my bicycle.
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