On Wikipedia, a small group of regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters have blacklisted independent media outlets like The Grayzone on explicitly political grounds, violating the encyclopedia’s guidelines.

This is part 1 in a series of investigative reports on the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Read part 2 here: “Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO“.

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Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia is censoring independent news websites by adding them to an official blacklist of taboo “deprecated” media outlets.

The Grayzone is among the news websites targeted by the censorship campaign. Others include leftist and anti-imperialist outlets like MintPress News and the Latin American news broadcaster Telesur, along with several prominent right-wing political sites, including the Daily Caller.

The campaign to blacklist The Grayzone was initiated by Wikipedia editors who identify as Venezuelans and openly support the country’s right-wing, US-backed opposition. These users obsessively monitor Venezuela-related articles, aggressively pushing a regime-change line and working to excise any piece of information or opinion that interferes with their agenda.

This online cabal of Venezuelan opposition supporters has been joined by an assortment of neoconservatives who spend countless hours per day, every day of the week, inundating Wikipedia articles with talking points defending Western intervention and demonizing NATO’s Official Enemies.

Together, this tiny handful of editors has successfully banned Wikipedia from citing The Grayzone, falsely claiming that the website publishes unreliable, false, or fabricated information. In fact, in its more than four years of existence, including its first two years hosted at the website AlterNet (whose use is not forbidden on Wikipedia), The Grayzone has never had to issue a major correction or retract a story.

Even more absurdly, the editors behind the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone made it clear in their public discussions that they were motivated to censor The Grayzone’s reporting based on the political perspective of its writers – not on the basis of any falsehoods or distortions that appeared on its website.

The Wikipedia editor who presided over the official “survey” to censor The Grayzone is a hyper-partisan supporter of the Venezuelan opposition. This figure also initiated and moderated the surveys to successfully blacklist TeleSUR and Venezuelanalysis, among the few news sources that challenge the hegemonic anti-Chavista perspective furthered by Western mainstream media.

Wikipedia has imposed numerous “guidelines” against this kind of advocacy editing, which blatantly violates the platform’s founding principle mandating a “neutral point of view.”

But the website, and the Wikimedia Foundation that runs it, has taken no action against the gang of politically motivated editors that targeted The Grayzone. Instead, it has given them free rein to flagrantly sabotage the encyclopedia’s ostensible commitment to neutrality, and shield the public from critical reporting that conflicts with Washington’s agenda.

The cast of editors seeking to censor The Grayzone runs the gamut from Russiagate conspiracy theorists to anarcho-neocons to regime-change lobbyists to elite Venezuelan opposition members – basically anyone threatened by journalism that challenges the Washington consensus. Their ability to dominate Wikipedia is symptomatic of a much larger crisis that has fundamentally corrupted the website and torn its stated principles to shreds.

The internet encyclopedia has become a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces. And it is run by figures who often represent these same elite interests, or align with their regime-change politics.

Only around 3,000 editors are very active on English-language Wikipedia

Wikipedia is dominated by state-sponsored propaganda and corporate PR

Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on Earth, with more traffic than the mega-corporation Amazon. It is far and away the top source of information for people all across the planet. (Wikipedia publishes in several different languages. This article focuses on the English-language version of Wikipedia, which is by far the largest.)

Yet while the website markets itself as an open-source encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit, the reality is the platform is tightly controlled by a small group of administrators and editors – and heavily dominated by powerful institutions that have the resources to mobilize users to advance their interests.

An academic study found that, from 2001 to 2010, a staggering 80 percent of edits on Wikipedia were made by just 1 percent of users.

In fact, statistics provided by Wikipedia shows that just over 3,000 editors are “very active” on the website, meaning they contribute more than 100 edits per month.

In other words, a tiny handful of editors have disproportionate control of what people across the world read when they research something online.

And retention rates for new editors have plummeted over the years.

A graph showing very low rates of editor retention rates on Wikipedia from 2004 to 2009

So Wikipedia is anything but the democratic and decentralized marketplace of ideas and information it advertises itself as.

Even more troubling is the fact that governments, intelligence agencies, and large corporations maintain significant influence over Wikipedia, editing the encyclopedia to push their agendas, while carefully monitoring articles and policing new edits.

The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and fossil fuel colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles.

But the rot goes much deeper. Powerful interests, from states to companies, hire Wikipedia editors to sanitize entries about themselves. Past clients for these services have included social media giant Facebook itself, along with corporate media juggernauts like NBC and the Koch Brothers oligarchs.

Wikipedia is the most perfectly corrupt neoliberal encyclopedia imaginable. There are countless examples like this, but it’ll be many more years before the culture manages a u-turn. The idea that “we” are in charge of wikipedia is seared into our minds https://t.co/VfrLvvsS6E

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 15, 2019

Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of willing propagandists, public relations flacks, and digital mercenaries who will eagerly manipulate the global population’s easy access to information if you pay them enough.

Similarly, far-right Israeli politician Naftali Bennett has organized training sessions to help new Wikipedia editors spread hasbara propaganda on Wikipedia. The Guardian newspaper noted that Israeli groups planned “a competition to find the ‘Best Zionist editor‘, with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.”

Numerous other governments and state-backed institutions have been caught carefully crafting their image on Wikipedia as well.

These astroturfing efforts have been known for a long time. The New York Times published an article on “corporate editing of Wikipedia” back in 2007. And the problem has only gotten worse since.

Wikipedia is essentially a bulletin board for powerful interests. And the group that runs it, the Wikimedia Foundation, has expressed little interest in combating this corruption. In the 2007 Times report, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that, while they discouraged conflicts of interests, “We don’t make it an absolute rule”; it is just a “guideline.”

These Wikipedia guidelines do technically forbid conflict-of-interest editing, but virtually nothing is done to stop it. And Wikipedia has no substantial mechanisms to monitor and root it out.

In fact Wikipedia also simultaneously tells editors they can simply “ignore all rules,” assuring them there are “no firm rules.” This contradiction shows how the encyclopedia can have its cake and eat it too, claiming to be decentralized, democratic, and opposed to political bias and special interests, while at the same time being utterly overwhelmed by these problems.

Politically motivated editing by small groups

The fact that the vast majority of edits on Wikipedia are performed by a tiny fraction of users makes it easy for small groups with time and resources to push political bias on the website.

Wikipedia has one of the highest search engine presences on all of the internet, so whatever appears on the website is virtually impossible to hide. Wikipedia is typically the top result for a topic, often above even the homepage of a website, in a search engine like Google.

In this way, a few elite editors have a massively outsize influence on the global population, manipulating public opinion to push their political line. And few people even know they exist.

Wikipedia is a scam. It's a propaganda vehicle for intelligence agencies, govts, corporations, and PR flacks

This extremely shady "user" Philip Cross edits all day every day, 7 am to 11 pm, posting nonstop pro-war propaganda — including almost every edit on @MaxBlumenthal's page pic.twitter.com/9ZOof5GxwC

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 12, 2020

There has been some coverage in alternative media, for instance, of the mysterious editor Philip Cross. This lone user spends hours per day, virtually every of the week, obsessively monitoring and editing articles to smear anti-war journalists and politicians.

Since @RaniaKhalek's @Wikipedia
page has been locked, Philip Cross is now turning his attention to @MaxBlumenthal. Now removing references to Mr Blumenthal's book "The Management of Savagery" on the grounds that it is "unreliable" and "much criticized".https://t.co/aw5GPBEM4y pic.twitter.com/UpSSVAOBKT

— leftworks (@leftworks1) January 12, 2020

But the problem is much larger than Philip Cross. A bigger group of pro-intervention editors who support Western regime-change operations spend huge amounts of time on Wikipedia censoring and distorting content to push their political agenda.

These editors not only manipulate and monopolize the globe’s easy access to information; they have even led campaigns to delete the Wikipedia articles of numerous left-wing journalists and media figures.

Popular YouTube host Kyle Kulinski had his page erased following a campaign by the coterie of regime change extremists. This author, Ben Norton, also had his Wikipedia article removed by this cabal.

Neoliberal trolls successfully got my Wikipedia page deleted. That's both hilarious and sad. If you're not part of the club they do everything they can to erase you, quite literally.

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) February 26, 2020

Politicized editing technically violates the second of Wikipedia’s five pillars, which requires editors to uphold a “neutral point of view.”

“All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic,” the principle states.

Wikipedia has similarly adopted a guideline against advocacy: “the use of Wikipedia to promote personal beliefs or agendas at the expense of Wikipedia’s goals and core content policies, including verifiability and neutral point of view.”

Moreover, Wikipedia claims to take issue with what is calls “single-purpose accounts,” or users “whose editing is limited to one very narrow area or set of articles, or whose edits to many articles appear to be for a common purpose.”

But in reality, the guidelines are hollow ideals that are scarcely, if ever, enforced – particularly when leftist and anti-imperialist media figures are under attack. Indeed, Wikipedia is dominated by editors that show a clear bias, and that use edits to push their ideology and political interests.

The platform has no mechanisms to hold these editors accountable and prevent this from happening. These users are responsible for the majority of edits on entire topics, especially controversial political issues. And Wikipedia has no teeth to reinforce the guidelines.

In the very rare cases that an editor is banned, they can simply create a new account; if their IP address is blocked, they can use a new device to edit.

This system makes it easy for a few users to coordinate together to not only write and edit articles to suit their interests, but even to blacklist entire news sources that expose their misdeeds.

The campaign to censor The Grayzone and other independent media outlets is a case study of this problem, and a clear reflection of the rampant bias that contradicts one of the core pillars of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s blacklist of independent media outlets

Wikipedia maintains an official list of reliable sources. These are the news outlets that editors are allowed to cite in an article.

Prominent editors and admins, who have special privileges not afforded to average users, debate what sources are considered legitimate on the encyclopedia. There is no independent oversight of this process. And it is for the most part monopolized by a small group, which has repeatedly shown a blatant political bias.

In its list of reliable sources, Wikipedia maintains a hierarchy of classifications to measure how accurate a media outlet is. These designations have a color and a name.

Mainstream corporate media outlets are green, deemed “generally reliable.” The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept all get the green light of approval.

Examples of sources considered “generally reliable” by Wikipedia, highlighted in green

For some sources, there is not an editorial consensus on their reliability, so they fall into the yellow category. Examples of are more Gonzo-style outlets like VICE, tabloids such as Cosmopolitan and the Daily Mirror, some think tanks like the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a few left-leaning websites like Democracy Now and CounterPunch.

However most independent news websites are considered by Wikipedia to be “generally unreliable,” and are hit with the red light of rejection. AlterNet, The Canary, and Electronic Intifada, for example, are considered “partisan sources,” and Wikipedia editors can only credit them if they attribute their statements to the website in the text of the article.

Sources that Wikipedia considers “generally unreliable” (light red), and those that have no consensus (yellow)

Some right-wing websites, such as The Blaze, the Daily Wire, and Quillette have been hit by this designation as well, along with the libertarian website Zero Hedge.

But the censorship targeting The Grayzone represents an entirely different level of suppression: The Grayzone is part of a small handful of publications that have been totally blacklisted on Wikipedia. It is considered a “deprecated source,” and is listed in dark red. This is the worst possible designation on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is censoring The Grayzone by listing it as “deprecated,” in dark red

This censorship is the product of a politicized pressure campaign by centrist, pro-war editors, who have sought to silence The Grayzone solely because they detest its reporting and editorial line. They have proven wholly unable to provide any concrete examples of inaccuracy or fabrication.

The hyper-partisan editors who led the censorious campaign (named and detailed below in this article) justified the blacklisting by claiming, “There is consensus that The Grayzone publishes false or fabricated information. Some editors describe The Grayzone as Max Blumenthal’s blog, and question the website’s editorial oversight.”

Once again, The Grayzone has never been forced to issue a major correction or retract a false story. The smear is absurd, and there is no evidence provided to back it up.

Joining The Grayzone on the Wikipedia blacklist is MintPress News, an independent left-leaning anti-war news website also based in the United States.

This group of centrist Wikipedia editors also deprecated The Daily Caller, a right-wing website that the editors claimed publishes “false or fabricated information.”

The Daily Caller, which was founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, certainly has published questionable material and editorials that any progressive would find deeply objectionable. Yet Wikipedia strangely places it on the same level as deranged far-right websites like The Epoch Times, a propaganda network run by the Chinese cult Falun Gong; the aggregation blog Gateway Pundit; Breitbart; and the white supremacist website VDARE.

According to Wikipedia, The Grayzone, an investigative journalism website founded by an award-winning journalist, is as unreliable as these other extremist media outlets.

At the same time, Wikipedia has given the interventionist pro-NATO blog Bellingcat a green light as a credible source on par with the AP.

Wikipedia considers regime-change website Bellingcat, which is funded by the US government’s NED, a reliable source

As The Grayzone has previously reported, Bellingcat is funded by the US government’s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout created by Ronald Reagan, and is host to a crew of regime-change advocates who work with Western government-backed organizations like the Atlantic Council.

Bellingcat’s founder and editor, video game-obsessed college dropout Eliot Higgins, has no professional journalistic experience or specialized knowledge. When the New York Times lightly criticized his lack of expertise, Higgins insisted he was qualified because “of the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”

But this centrist gang of Wikipedia editors has designated Bellingcat a reliable source on par with the most prestigious of newspapers, while simultaneously blacklisting and censoring the investigative journalism of The Grayzone, a news website founded and edited by Max Blumenthal, who – unlike Higgins – is an award-winning journalist who has published investigative scoops in many mainstream publications and authored four acclaimed books over the course of the past two decades.

Wikipedia editors have also determined that the now-defunct neoconservative, staunchly pro-war website The Weekly Standard is a “generally reliable” source, on the same level as the AFP.

The Weekly Standard, which was run by Bill Kristol, the godfather of American neoconservatism, printed numerous lies and demonstrably false stories in the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, trying to make the case for the war on behalf of the George W. Bush administration.

Wikipedia considers neoconservative website The Weekly Standard to be a reliable source

Thus Wikipedia considers neoconservative websites that printed conspiratorial lies about non-existent “WMDs” to be reliable sources, while blacklisting The Grayzone apparently because it publishes factual reporting that undermines these regime-change deceptions.

Wikipedia’s standards also show a clear double standard for state-backed media networks. Those that are run by Western governments such as the BBC, or which are friendly to Western government interests like Qatar’s Al Jazeera, receive the green stamp of approval as “generally reliable,” considered on par with Reuters.

Wikipedia gives Qatar state-backed Al Jazeera its green stamp of “generally reliable” approval

But news outlets backed by governments targeted by the US for regime change, such as TeleSUR, RT, HispanTV, and Press TV, are all considered deprecated sources by Wikipedia, and bear the dark red color signifying unreliability.

Wikipedia blacklists TeleSUR as a “deprecated” source

Wikipedia has also demonized the transparency publishing organization WikiLeaks, officially classifying it “generally unreliable,” branding it with the feared red color, and banning use of its documents as sources on articles.

Wikipedia claims that “there are concerns regarding whether the documents are genuine or tampered.” In fact, WikiLeaks has a 100 percent track record for publishing accurate documents. This is not disputed by any reliable source.

Wikipedia does not consider WikiLeaks to be reliable source, despite its track record of 100 percent accuracy

Campaign to blacklist The Grayzone initiated by right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporter

All edits made on Wikipedia are publicly listed. Every article includes an accessible “revision history” page, which shows all materials that were added or removed, at what time, and by what users — although the vast majority of editors are anonymous.

This makes it easy to track down who exactly is pushing a political line on the platform, and how they are abusing the encyclopedia to advance their partisan agenda, blatantly violating Wikipedia’s guidelines mandating a neutral point of view and rejecting advocacy and single-purpose accounts.

An investigation of the editors behind the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone clearly shows that the majority are politically motivated users who exploit Wikipedia to push their sectarian agenda.

In fact, the Wikipedia editor who initiated the official survey to censor The Grayzone is a right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporter who makes no effort to conceal their desire to target outlets with which they politically disagree.

In August 2019, an editor who used the username MaoGo, which was later changed to ReyHahn, initiated a discussion among Wikipedia editors “On the reliability of The Grayzone.”

On their profile, MaoGo/ReyHahn states openly that they are Venezuelan, and the user’s edits make it clear that the editor is strongly supportive of the country’s right-wing opposition and deeply opposed to the leftist Chavista movement and government of President Nicolás Maduro.

A glance at ReyHahn’s edits showed the user obsessively editing Venezuela-related pages on Wikipedia nearly every single day, for hours per day.

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