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'Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages' (huffpost.com)
The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. And it almost always works."
Spin reports:
The benefit of hiring Sussman, aside from insulating talking heads from the humiliation of being found to have edited their own pages, is that he applies the exacting and annoying vigor of an attorney to Wikipedia's stringent editing rules. Further, because his opponents in these arguments are not opposing lawyers but instead Wikipedia's unpaid editors, he's really effective. From HuffPost:
"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."
NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.
"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."
NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.
People trust Wikipedia because they believe it to be untainted. That trust is what immediately makes it a target for corruption.
It doesn't matter if an information source is run by volunteers or paid staff; the payment method is not what guarantees neutrality.
In fact, nothing can guarantee neutrality. The instant anything is widely believed to be neutral, it becomes a target for corruption, and there is no final way to prevent that corruption from infecting the information.
Because our corporate overlords have our best interests at heart, and no one has ever earned a salary doing something nefarious.
It's been a stunningly obvious problem with wikipedia-- THE_TOY_WEB-- all along, but they've somehow managed to keep their heads in the sand for decades.
You would not "assume good faith" if there were ten dollars on the table, so there's no way you would try to work that way if you were doing anything at all of importance-- like, oh say, hypothetically, running information infrastructure crucicial for the functioning of a modern democratic industrial state.
It seems like the sensible solution here is to ban for-profit editors (and revert their changes). Regardless of accuracy, profitability creates a significant motive to corrupt Wikipedia.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Kind of like /. moderators flagging something "troll" or "flamebait" when you post something demonstrably true/factual, like a direct quote or a news article, that (I'm guessing) they disagree / disapprove of -- often it's something about our President.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
User:BC1278
User's current talk page:
User contributions: last 500, article space only, hide minor edits
Making outrageous and generalizing claims about the entirety of Wikipedia.
Posting as AC.
Not providing a single reference for any of the claims.
There we have 3 red flags for bullshit posting on the internet. And at this point it's modded +4 Interesting of which are 30% Informative and 20% Insightful.
He's being paid by companies to whitewash.
You claim whitewash; do you have an example?
See the end of the article for a short example. He convinced wikipedia to remove the section on Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia's charges of a hit-and-run. The charges were later reduced as part of a plea bargain. Is that relevant for a public figure? Maybe. Is it whitewashing? Sure.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.