IF YOU WERE a space alien, as opposed to an illegal alien, and had never heard of Joe or Hunter Biden, you might think you should look up his name in the world’s internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia. If you did, you would read the following, unedited, today [links in original]:
“Robert Hunter Biden (born February 4, 1970) is an American attorney, businessman, and artist. He has also been a hedge fund principal and a venture capital and private equity fund investor. He formerly worked as a banker, a lobbyist, and a legal representative for lobbying firms.
Biden is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden. In 1972, when Biden was two years old, a car crash killed his mother, who was driving, and his one-year-old sister, Naomi, and seriously injured both him and his older brother, Beau. In his memoir, Beautiful Things, Biden wrote of his struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, which escalated after Beau’s death, in 2015, from brain cancer.[1][2] He was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve shortly after his commissioning, due to a failed drug test.
Biden was a founding board member of BHR Partners,[3] a Chinese investment company, in 2013. He served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since early 2019, Hunter and his father, Joe Biden, have been the subjects of false allegations of corrupt activities in a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory. The accusations concern Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts there.[4]
The New York Post published an article in October 2020 about a laptop computer that had belonged to Hunter Biden. The laptop supposedly contained about 129,000 emails and other materials, but the Post provided no evidence of the chain of custody or authenticity of the device. Other media outlets declined to publish the story, because of that lack of provenance.[5]…”
How biased is that? Truth be told, no one who wants to learn anything, anything that’s true, that is, wouldn’t have gone to Wikipedia for years because of this obvious and unabashed leftist bias that seeps through the digital page like the internet sewerage it is. Thus, it didn’t surprise me to read an article about Wikipedia co-founder (with Jimmy Wales), Lawrence Mark Sanger, and his interview with investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, where he is quoted extensively about his views on the site’s bias.’
Sanger claimed in the interview that Wikipedia had become a tool of “control” in the hands of the U.S. government, notably, the C.I.A., F.B.I., and other intelligence agencies. He believed the site had become a means of weaponization sometime between 2005 and 2015, using “information warfare…conducted online.” “We do have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … that CIA and F.B.I. computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” Sanger admitted. In fact, Sanger’s belief is supported by evidence produced by a computer programming student named Virgil Griffith, who published proof of C.I.A. and F.B.I. activity on Wikipedia in 2007. Griffith had produced a program he called Wikiscanner that could trace the location of computers used to edit wikis on Wikipedia. By 2008, even the Huffington Post had to admit the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had edited numerous Wikipedia articles and remove incriminating information. The C.I.A., for example, used its computers to remove casualty counts from the Iraq War. The F.B.I., for its part, deleted images of Guantanamo Bay and edited articles on multiple other topics.
Sanger spoke of a “gradual change” over the years, citing the period between 2006 and 2008 as a period where Wikipedia articles on scientific topics, like ‘global warming,’ exhibited “over-the-top bias.” By the period 2010 to 2015, he saw “obviously biased” articles opposing Eastern and holistic medicine while promoting Western medicine. By the time of President Trump’s election, Sanger said that “no encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.” He didn’t know for sure whether the intelligence agencies themselves manipulated Wikipedia articles or if they hired influential people to advance the desired agendas.
Sanger seemed distressed that Wikipedia’s “original neutrality policy” by “rank and file Wikipedians” had been hijacked by the biases of ‘progressive’ media, such as CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times. Remarkably, he revealed that Wikipedia had officially declared that “80 percent of the major sources of news on the right to be unreliable.”
Sanger suggested other online encyclopedias be used, such as Ballotpedia and Conservapedia, but readily acknowledged they don’t rank well with Google’s SEO algorithm. Unfortunately, what began as a great idea became an exercise at ‘democratizing’ expertise and submitting to the lowest common denominator, and then just became a political weapon of bureaucrats acting under cloak of secrecy.
If you are to believe the Wikipedia article about him, Sanger hasn’t been involved with Wikipedia since early 2002 when he was laid off. Since then, he has been accused by Vice of being “Wikipedia’s Most Outspoken Critic,” based on his belief it ignored his policies to “ignore all rules, [keep a] neutral point of view, [use] no original research, and [providing] verifiability.” Wales was guilty of ignoring his policies, too, according to Sanger, who didn’t appreciate his colleague’s minimizing and editing of his own contributions to the site.
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