Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 180 posts

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#151

Post by Tadpole9181 »

tptacek wrote: post #143
grover_board wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The administration has just directed the head of the FHFA to create a pretext to illegally remove a governor of the Federal Reserve, what on earth do you think would stop House Republicans from ginning up some nonsense pretext for a politically motivated DoJ investigation? Why on earth do you think these people are bound by anything other than what they can get away with?

See the difference? The administration can in fact disrupt the Federal Reserve, and appears intent on doing so. But they would much rather you were talking about Wikipedia, which is something they have basically no power over whatsoever.

Uh, no. The administration explicitly cannot disrupt the federal reserve by law. That's why they're cooking bogus justifications against the governor.

Likewise, they'll just make shit up or use some tiny administrative technicality against Wikipedia.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#152

Post by sgnelson »

lukev wrote: post #59
Aurornis wrote: post #3

I don’t trust this administration to perform an unbiased investigation, but it’s not a secret that Wikipedia is a high profile target for anyone who wants to push an agenda. Even trivial topics can attract die-hards who refuse to let an article say something they don’t like. Wikipedia also seeks to have a similar problem to StackOverflow where some users have become very good at working their way into the site’s stru…

Should any administration be investigating a private entity for bias? Whether there is bias or not is entirely immaterial! The government should not be the Ministry of Truth!

It's amazing how many discussions on HN are about "Company A is bad" instead of: "This behavior by the government is completely illegal or unethical and should not be occurring in a free society."

And as the very first comment points out, whether there is truth in the charge or not, now there are people saying "A is bad because I read it on the interwebs!" And regardless of where the investigation goes, there will be more comments talking about the good/bad of Wikipedia, and not the good/bad of the US government (or other governments as the case may be.) This is about the 10th post in the past week that suffers from this phonomenon (see the US buying part of Intel posts for an excellent example.)

HN commenters are very very good at missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional. Unfortunately, I think it often isn't.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#154

Post by tptacek »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #151
tptacek wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the difference? The administration can in fact disrupt the Federal Reserve, and appears intent on doing so. But they would much rather you were talking about Wikipedia, which is something they have basically no power over whatsoever.

Uh, no. The administration explicitly cannot disrupt the federal reserve by law. That's why they're cooking bogus justifications against the governor. Likewise, they'll just make shit up or use some tiny administrative technicality against Wikipedia.

I do not disagree. The administration should not be allowed to terminate Fed governors. I'm optimistic that there is a SCOTUS majority that will prevent it (they explicitly drew a line around the Federal Reserve recently), but we'll see. But clearly: the administration can fire Executive Branch employees, and has a legal interpretation extending that the the Fed.

There is nothing at all connecting the administration to Wikipedia. People are falling for an op the GOP is running.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#155

Post by deepfriedchokes »

iandanforth wrote: post #24

This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined. There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a d…

Ideological suggests they have ideals, and values, but I think it’s simpler than that: This is about power and submission.

All of Trump’s seemingly irrational decisions are his emotionally rational pursuit of forcing people to submit, just like his dad did to him [0]. Like a lot of boomers scarred by untreated trauma, that’s what he understands respect to be: submission. It was wrong then, and wrong now, but attacking Trump, while intuitive, is the wrong way to engage him.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/07/donald-trump...

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#156

Post by onetimeusename »

iandanforth wrote: post #24

This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined. There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a d…

Why do you say that? What makes you say this is McCarthyism which was an accusation made against people in the House? I read the article and it says they are opening a probe into foreign influence peddling and people receiving taxpayer funding to do influence peddling and they asked for information from the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. You might disagree those are worth investigating but that sounds a lot more reasonable than McCarthyism. The headline makes it seem like they are simply just investigating bias.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#157

Post by cherry_tree »

onetimeusename wrote: post #156
iandanforth wrote: post #24

This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined. There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a d…

Why do you say that? What makes you say this is McCarthyism which was an accusation made against people in the House? I read the article and it says they are opening a probe into foreign influence peddling and people receiving taxpayer funding to do influence peddling and they asked for information from the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. You might disagree those are worth investigating but that sounds a lot more re…

What do you think McCarthyism is?

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#158

Post by dazed_confused »

throw0101c wrote: post #136
iandanforth wrote: post #24

This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined. There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a d…

[flagged]

It is a bad thing and anyone who thinks otherwise is acting in bad faith.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#159

Post by bawolff »

aeternum wrote: post #150
bawolff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading it I have no idea if "support for volunteers" means supporting wikipedia editors, corporate, donations I think its pretty clear that "support for volunteers" does not mean corporate. I too would like more detailed budgets, but we do have some info here. > Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations The list of la…

>my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment. That might be their justification but is it actually true? Specifically: Do you believe that every major right-wing paper promotes conspiracy theories while every major left-wing paper does not?

I would disagree with your premise that every major right wing paper is listed.

For example fox news and the Washington Examiner are considered right wing and are not listed as a deprecated source.

Similarly there are left wing sources on the deprecated list like the grayzone or Occupy Democrats. (Arguably those are rather fringe)

Certainly the epoch times has been widely criticized for being factually inaccurate in ways the new york times has not been.

I also don't particularly think the new york times is equivalent to the epoch times in terms of reputation.

Re: House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

#160

Post by dlubarov »

bawolff wrote: post #159
aeternum wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment. That might be their justification but is it actually true? Specifically: Do you believe that every major right-wing paper promotes conspiracy theories while every major left-wing paper does not?

I would disagree with your premise that every major right wing paper is listed. For example fox news and the Washington Examiner are considered right wing and are not listed as a deprecated source. Similarly there are left wing sources on the deprecated list like the grayzone or Occupy Democrats. (Arguably those are rather fringe) Certainly the epoch times has been widely criticized for being factually inaccurate in…

Fox News was deemed "generally unreliable" for politics and science, which in practice means that it's unusable in most cases, not so different from deprecated.

I also find it interesting that Al-Manar (essentially Hezbollah's media office) has a slightly better status than, say, Daily Mail.

See also (Wikipedia cofounder) Larry Sanger's critique of Wikipedia' source bias - https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...

Post reply on HN