Billionaire Elon Musk knocked Wikipedia on Tuesday after the online encyclopedia threatened to delete the page for “Twitter Files Investigations.”
Last week, independent journalist Matt Taibbi released the internal communications of Twitter employees during the 2020 election and their ultimate decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post. Come Tuesday, the Wikipedia page documenting the story, titled “Twitter Files Investigations,” faced deletion from its notoriously left-leaning editors.
“Wikipedia is voting on the deletion of the entry for Elon Musk’s Twitter Files because the editors have deemed it a ‘nothing burger’ that is ‘not notable’ because the media didn’t give it enough coverage. These people work hand in hand with the MSM to shape the narrative,” tweeted conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong in his alert of Elon Musk.
Cheong then provided several screenshots of comments from Wikipedia editors describing the story as noting, or, as one editor put it, a “nothing event about another nothing event.” Another editor also said that the story had been “generally ignored by the media (with good reason)” without citing that supposed “good reason.”
Musk later responded Cheong’s tweets and accused Wikipedia of having a “non-trivial left-wing bias.” He then tagged Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to weigh in.
While Jimmy Wales did not respond to Musk, the other Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, already sounded off on the site’s left-wing bias in 2020 when he argued in a blog post that it abandoned neutrality in the name of avoiding what activist journalists call the “false balance” – the idea that not all opposing views of an argument should be given equal time. He goes through several pages to support his thesis, noting the rather charged language often employed.
“The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump,” argued Sanger.
“A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good,” he continued. “The only scandals that I could find that were mentioned were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash.”
After going through several more pages, including some rather biased language in reference to the existence of Jesus Christ and the abortion argument, Sanger concluded by calling on Wikipedia to just come clean and admit it no longer practices fair neutrality.
“It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). At the very least they should admit that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one,” Sanger wrote. “Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to concede any such thing; they live in a fantasy world of their own making.”