Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger made waves this week when he discussed the crowdsourced website’s outright censorship of conservative voices via a blacklist of banned news outlets.
For me, Sanger’s revelation came as no surprise: The news publication I founded and run, The Federalist, has been viciously censored by Wikipedia’s cabal of anonymous editors for more than a decade.
We originally drew Wikipedia’s ire back in 2014 when we exposed left-wing darling Neil deGrasse Tyson as a serial fabulist and fabricator.
At the time, the astrophysicist and professional bigmouth was going around the country giving talks about the ignorance and innumeracy of most journalists and politicians.
He had a point! I, too, doubt the ability of most people in politics to tally a tip without a calculator.
But unfortunately for Tyson, many of the examples he used as evidence of their incompetence didn’t exist.
As we reported, LexisNexis failed to return any results for the headlines and quotes featured in Tyson’s presentation. Tyson simply made them up.
As we dug deeper into Tyson’s history, we found even more examples of stories that just didn’t add up — most glaringly, his outright fabrication of a quote he attributed to former President George W. Bush.
Tyson, we reported, used the fake quote to smear Bush as a dummy and to deride Christians as idiots who don’t understand the universe as well as scientists like himself.
But Bush’s top speechwriters and press aides all attested he’d never said what Tyson claimed, and even The Washington Post reported that Tyson “regularly repeated a false account” to “cast aspersions on another public figure.”
Wikipedia’s editors would have none of it. They erased all evidence of Tyson’s repeated fabrications and falsehoods from the site.
“Telling a funny anecdote with fudgy details to make a joke/point is not a controversy,” sniffed one of the anonymous editors who cleaned up Tyson’s lies.
Another anonymous editor then banned The Federalist from the list of Wikipedia’s reliable sources, allowing the site to claim that because no “reliable sources” had published evidence of Tyson’s fabrications, Wikipedia would include no mention of the controversy on Tyson’s page.
Eat your heart out, Kafka.
To this day, Tyson’s Wikipedia page contains not a single reference to his well-documented history of fabulism.
Incredibly, the site has only gone downhill since then.
It’s no longer just The Federalist on the Wikipedia blacklist; other news organizations banned from being used as sources include Fox News, The Blaze, Newsmax, Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Daily Wire and even The New York Post.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia deems as inherently reliable such news organizations as CNN, The New York Times, NPR and Politico, all of which repeatedly published demonstrably false claims about Trump and Russia, COVID-19’s origin, the 2020 BLM riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other contentious topics.
If the impact of this nakedly ideological censorship was limited to just a single website, it might not be such a big deal.
But Wikipedia isn’t some random website — it forms the foundation of many AI language models, which run on algorithms trained on its biased entries.
What happens when every major AI bot runs exclusively on left-wing slop that’s utterly divorced from reality?
We don’t have to wonder, because we are already seeing those effects — from absurd woke images of female Popes and African Nazis, to AI-written legal briefs authoritatively citing nonexistent case law.
And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until your credit score, or your mortgage rate, or even your job depends on what these garbage-in-garbage-out algorithms say about your worthiness as a borrower or employee.
Social credit scores are coming, and they’ll be based on whatever highly censored nonsense makes its way into Wikipedia entries and Reddit threads.
The rise of Wikipedia’s censorship sadly reflects the rise of leftist repression and authoritarianism in the United States and throughout the world.
It starts with banning speech, moves to the destruction of statues and historical monuments and artifacts, and eventually devolves into violence against actual people.
We saw this all too plainly when Charlie Kirk, a Christian conservative known for his open, respectful debates with college students, was assassinated for saying true things leftists didn’t want to hear.
And if that weren’t horrifying enough, thousands on the left responded to Kirk’s murder by applauding it.
Censorship isn’t just a theoretical danger, and its effects aren’t limited to a publication here and a website there.
It is a threat to civilization itself, and we have to stop it before it’s too late.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist.