In a startling revelation on the ‘System Update’ podcast hosted by journalist Glenn Greenwald, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, asserted that the website he helped launch in 2001 has transformed into a tool of “information warfare” used by the U.S. liberal establishment and intelligence community.
The entities he implicated included the CIA, FBI, and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
He voiced his concerns about how the platform has evolved into an apparatus of “control” for the left-liberal institution.
Sanger raised questions about the clandestine activities of intelligence agencies on Wikipedia, stating, “We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” and posed a rhetorical question, “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
This information was first revealed to the public in 2007 by Virgil Griffith, a programming student.
Griffith created WikiScanner, a program capable of tracking the origins of computers editing Wikipedia articles.
He unveiled that numerous high-profile corporations, government agencies, the CIA, and the FBI have been implicated in manipulating the information presented on the website.
According to Griffith’s findings, CIA computers were utilized to alter casualty statistics from the Iraq War and to edit various articles, such as those on the then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s nuclear program, and the Argentine navy.
The FBI was implicated in the deletion of aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The edits also included self-aggrandizing actions like former CIA chief William Colby amending his own entry to enhance his list of achievements.
Detailing the modus operandi of these agencies, Sanger explained how the intelligence agencies “pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people.”
He further stressed the significance of online platforms in the contemporary landscape of information warfare, saying that a “great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” and pointed to “websites like Wikipedia.”
