The Right’s Smear Campaign Against Wikipedia ⇥ citationneeded.news
When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia, and the right’s frustration with platforms that remain resilient against such control.
I first noticed this campaign about three years ago when clips of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on Fox News began circulating among the more reactionary corners of the web. While he has disparaged the site regularly since his long-ago departure, Sanger stepped up his attacks a few years ago after professional contrarians like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald gave him an uncritical platform to do so.
As White writes, there is plenty to criticize about Wikipedia. But Sanger, Musk, and others are jamming this into the same narrative they apply to everything because they are all intellectually lazy. The bananas thing is that it is Wikipedia — the site where you can check just about every edit for yourself. But because few people are actually going to do that and it is possible to produce seemingly damning screenshots, you can see how this nonsense can take shape.