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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:30]
B
welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Ashley Rinsberg. Ashley is the senior editor at Pirate Wires, a new media company. He's also the author of Tel Aviv Stories and the Gray Lady Winked, which we talked about last time he came on the show a few years ago today we talked about the threats to objectivity in journalism. In particular, we talk about how Wikipedia has evolved from an objective, unbiased source of information to a source controlled by small cliques of self interested admins. We also talk about alternatives to Wikipedia like Grokopedia. We talk about the implications of wikipedia bias on LLMs and the future of information and much more. So without further ado, Ashley Rinsberg. Most people think their only options for bad sleep are pills or just powering through it. But there's a clinically proven treatment for insomnia. Most people have never heard of CBT I Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia. It's what actual sleep clinics use, and instead of masking the problem, it retrains your brain and body to sleep naturally. That's what Sleep Reset is built on. It's the only digital program that pairs a personalized sleep schedule with guidance from real sleep coaches. Like having a sleep clinic in your pocket. Whether your mind won't shut off at night, you're waking up at 3am or you never feel rested no matter how long you sleep. Sleep Reset is designed for exactly that. It's the highest rated CBTI program in the App Store. Thousands of people have used it to fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and actually wake up feeling refreshed. No medication required. It may even be covered by your insurance. For our listeners, Sleep Reset is offering a free 7 day trial available only@vsle sleepreset.com podcast. Start your first week of real Clinician designed insomnia treatment tonight. Ashley Rinsberg, thanks so much for coming back on my show.
- [02:36]
C
Thank you Coleman. It's good to be back years later.
- [02:40]
B
Yeah, so I had you on a couple years ago when you wrote your book called the Gray Lady Winked. That was the title, right?
- [02:47]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [02:48]
B
And that was about the history of the New York Times getting major stories Wrong. And being ideologically biased. And there's a lot of stuff I learned in that book, and people should go back to that episode to look at that. But today I want to talk to you about a few. A pair of articles you've released relating to Wikipedia's structural biases, the editing, the politically motivated editing that goes on there, and why all of that matters a great deal for our informational ecosystem. So I guess the first place to start is a little bit about you. Who are you? Why do you care about this issue? How do you connect it to your overall study of. I guess journalistic objectivity would be one way of framing it.
- [03:43]
C
Yeah, who am I? That's a great question. The question of Andre Breton, the great surrealist novelist, wrote that book Nadia, his most famous book, and it begins with that question, who am I? And I think that's like, the question of identity is important to what's going on on Wikipedia because the ideological stuff is connected to people's political identity. For me, it's about the other side of that, which is rescuing an idea of objective truth. That in my book as well, I wrote in the introduction to the book, we had given up on a notion of objectivity in media, in the news. And in some cases, that was done purposefully, deliberately. That was done during the first Trump presidency by the media. It was done in the pages of the New York Times. And this was something people really noticed. I noticed it. But what I really wanted to understand when I wrote the Gray Lady Winked was, was this one off? Like you'd have a case like Walter Duranty, whose sort of shilling for the Soviets, or was it bigger than just one off? And that's what the book became for me. It was an exploration of the question of objectivity, or the attempt for objectivity in news and media versus outright partisan ideology. That's the kind of broader framework. And for me personally, this matters because I think the reason it matters for all of us and people reading the news or on social media, because you feel something is untrue. You feel it in your bones. You know, it grinds at you because it's being weaponized against you in many cases. And you want to know why. You want to understand the mechanics of it. And I think that's what connects what I was doing at the Times and what I'm doing now with Wikipedia, which is the most important digital platform for what's considered to be ground truth by the Internet.
- [05:38]
B
There's always been, I think, a paradox that lies at the heart of journalism, which Is, on the one hand, there is a code of the journalist which requires objectivity. It doesn't require political neutrality in the sense that you can't vote or you can't have preferences, but it really does require that you are kind of a neutral referee of the information that you receive and convey on the one hand. But on the other hand, every journalist gets into journalism because they really care about particular issues. So every journalist, I would argue, is an advocate in his or her heart. But once you get into the ring, you are expected to, and you should, in fact, abide by a code of ethics that leaves your advocacy at the front door and submits to a set of rules. Like, it's almost like, you know, every basketball player wants to win the game, but if you're playing street ball, street ball, you're expected to not cheat in order to win the game. You're expected to call fouls and respect foul calls on the other team. And there's a certain type of player that actually just does whatever they want to win and doesn't care about the rules. But there's another type of player that, yeah, wants to win, but. But puts that secondary to a code of values that sort of restrains their own passions. And so, in a way, I guess that's all to say we talk about objectivity as this journalistic value. It is this journalistic value. It is the code that we are all meant to abide by, but that's always put in tension with the passions of individual journalists that they inevitably have. So how do you, as an individual, resolve that paradox inside your own heart, if at all?
- [07:35]
C
I think that's generally okay. I think it's not that contradictory that journalists are people and they have interests and values and even robots do. As we've seen with LLMs, there's a bias. There's no perfect expression of objectivity, but I think what there can be, is. Is a respect for that. Objectivity does exist. What we saw over the last, let's say, at least a decade in the media, probably more in the broader, let's say in academia, was a rejection of the concept of objectivity entirely. So the bias that people were expressing was considered to be its own form of truth, a personal truth. But for the rest of us, we're supposed to respect it as if it's actually an objective truth, even though it's not. So this rejection of objectivity at a cultural level, even on a personal level, to say, I believe there's an objective truth out there, I may not get it on this attempt, or I might even push for my side on this attempt. But I'm still maintaining some connection to good faith. Because you think truth is a thing. There's almost like a moral objective in that notion as well as a literal objective. So this is a big cultural thing we all went through. And I think you've talked a lot about this idea, the rejection of objectivity, the relativization of truth itself. And this is what we saw appear in the media. It's now also what we're seeing appear on Wikipedia, because they learned the same lessons about manipulation of perception equals functionally manipulating truth itself, even though that's actually not true, because we know there is an objective, independent truth. And that's why what's happening on Wikipedia is such a problem, because it's treated as truth by the Internet. It's treated as truth by Google and by AI.
- [09:31]
B
Yeah. Before we get to Wikipedia, I want to do just a really brief reminder for people about what you're talking about when you say that the mainstream media, some people in the mainstream media, consciously abandoned the notion of objective truth or objectivity in journalism during Trump's first term. I think it's worth doing a quick refresher on what you mean when you say that and who it was who made the argument, what that argument was, especially in view of the second Trump term. So let's say you are a liberal or a progressive, or even a conservative that is a strong critic of Trump, and you hate what he's doing, whether it's foreign policy or whether it's immigration enforcement, deportations, and so forth. It's worth reflecting on everything that was done to resist Trump in the first term in media. The net result of it still ended up being a second Trump term much later. So it's part of a lesson that we as a species have to learn over and over again, which is, you know, weaponization of information, loss of objectivity. It quite often doesn't achieve what you set out to achieve.
- [10:50]
C
Yeah, and, you know, Trump's first term, we saw, like, articles in the front page of the New York Times. I forget the guy's name. I think he's a professor of journalism, really well known figure who comes out saying, basically, drastic times call for drastic measures. And as journalists, our drastic measures is to be an advocate against Trump, an opponent, an active opponent of him and doing what we can. And that means neutrality has to go out the window for now. And, you know, once it's for now, it's forever. But I don't even think that was the, that was the real issue. Like that was one or two articles. The bigger issue is that for the first, I mean, it must have been the first four years of the presidency, the first term and the entirety of the campaign and the post presidency where the media pushed this notion that Trump had colluded with Kremlin in order to swing the election. That was something that they did collectively. Virtually every mainstream outlet out there participated and they made wild, outlandish claims, their claims of treason at the highest level. And virtually no significant strand of that was actually borne out in the reporting itself, even though the reporting ended up in the media at the time. I think about the amazing, amazing five part series that Jeff Gerth did. He's a former Pulitzer winning investigative reporter for the Times. He wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that he basically dissected every of the major strands of the so called Russiagate, whatever you want to call it, effort or fiasco or campaign, showing that virtually all of it, all the important parts were either debunked or were never fully proven out, or if they were, they were not actually significant. This was across five, six years of reporting. The media was never, not only were they not held to account, I mean, conservative media tried, but they never held themselves to account for it. They never were able to zoom out and say, hold on a second, something happened here that was not quite right. And I think that's because they very much believed in it. They were very eager to work with Fusion gps, who was employed by the Clinton campaign to pull this off. And I think this was the big shift where we're saying as a collective, as the media itself, we are going for this regardless of all the very not quite kosher aspects of it, like Fusion gps working for the Clinton campaign and distributing vest vast amounts of this information to the media directly that off the face of it seems problematic. And then again, the fact that the attempt was to delegitimize the election by other means, I mean, the right has done the same thing in a very direct, sometimes ham handed, sometimes blunt way. I think the same thing was done with the participation of the media in a much more sophisticated and subtle way.
- [14:11]
B
Okay, so I can hear the voice of a progressive or Democrat right now saying, well, look, that was stuff you're talking about seven, five, six, seven years ago. What about just recently, Jeff Bezos on the eve of the election giving an instruction to the Washington Post about their coverage of Trump. Right, which was no doubt influenced by the fact that Jeff Bezos wants, you know, he understands Trump controls tariff policy for the most powerful nation in the world, that has huge implications for Amazon's bottom line. Is that not an equivalent kind of slanting of information? Given that he owns the Washington Post, is there a danger that this is now happening in the opposite direction? Is the idea?
- [15:02]
C
Yeah, sure, definitely. I think in that particular case, the directive he gave was regarding the endorsements, wasn't it was about endorsements and maybe had something to do with the opinion page. I don't think he actually came out saying coverage to change. I think it was much farther up the opinion ladder than that. And, you know, let's say he did say that. That would be, I think, a big problem for the Washington Post and they would have an issue on their hands at an organizational level, at the level of a single company. I think what we saw with Russiagate was virtually the entirety of the media, if not the entirety, milling out hundreds of stories, thousands of hours of broadcast over 5, 6 year period. This is something that changed the way people perceive the media. Along with COVID I think that was the other big breaking point, some of the BLM stuff during COVID as well. But this was one of those big contributing factors where people say, after five, six years and there's no real outcome, what was that all about? And on the right, it creates even more distrust for the media than there previously was. So this was something that was, I think, much more fundamental than the kind of like in the news industry. I think we all know today, especially in the newspaper industry, it's such a hard business to make money in that you need benefactors like Bezos. But it's not just on the right. You have the exact same dynamic on the left with tons of magazines. They just don't get talked about the way the Washington Post does. Conde Nast, the New Republic, the Nation, all these are supported in large part by the wealth of people who've made money in other places. So it's a problem. But it also corrected a lot of people resigned at the Post. So I don't think these are. Of course there's the same issue on the right becoming the case. Of course we can backslide into that. But still, I think the outright rejection of objectivity in the favor of political ideology was a major shift.
- [17:24]
B
Okay, so let's then talk about Wikipedia. I've always thought that Wikipedia got a bad rap, at least when I was a kid. And teachers would say, don't look at Wikipedia in order to do your project. Look at Britannica, look at, you know, Cambridge Encyclopedia or whatever it is. And I was happy to look at those sources too, but I always thought actually Wikipedia often provided information that was not available in other sources, and that the net outcome of this adversarial editing process, where people on different sides of the issue are all able to edit it according to a shared standard of rules, well, judged by its output, it's pretty good. And I mean pretty good compared to the alternatives, right? Not perfect. So first, before we get into some of the biases you've identified, can you tell my audience sort of how Wikipedia editing works? Who gets to decide what ends up on the landing page of a Wikipedia article, and what is that process like?
- [18:30]
C
The process, in theory, is that you can go to Wikipedia and sign up. You actually don't even have to register if you don't want to. You can just edit under a random number that's given to you, choose a topic, figure out how their kind of very light technical language works, it's not that complicated. And make some edits and learn the ropes, learn the principles and the rules and the guidelines, and off you go. And that's probably true for the most part. If you're editing something like the history of a certain kind of flower in France or something to do with a arcane math textbook from the 19th century that made an impact, things like that, where people are not paying attention, you're probably going to be fine. The moment you come to something that is remotely charged politically or socially or culturally or historically, that's where everything changes. So if you happen to be an expert in, let's say, something to do with gender, maybe you're a biologist and you have something to correct about the way an article having to do with gender has been constructed as it regards to biology. You go in, you make your change, you know what you're talking about. Within minutes, that edit will be reverted, it'll be defeated, and you'll go back and try it again, and you'll try to insert some commentary to explain it, and it'll be defeated again. And then you'll try again, and then you'll be accused of trying to start an edit war. And eventually you're going to throw your hands up and give up because you don't have the time. And that's how two or three editors can dominate. Not just a page on Wikipedia, but an entire topic area like American politics or Israel, Palestine or Iran or China or Russia, Ukraine is these little clusters that basically use this very complex system of rules, guidelines, essays and principles that all get parsed through a kind of jargon that you're not going to understand. And then at the end of the day, it becomes this kind of brute force where people have learned to work in pairs and trios to outlast or exhaust what they see as an opponent. On the other side of that could be someone just trying to make a naive good faith at it.
- [20:53]
B
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I know for a while, especially after I testified against reparations for slavery, my Wikipedia page was the site of competing editors trying to include and exclude facts about my biography that would make me more or less sympathetic. So I remember. So my ethnicity is half African American, half Puerto Rican. Mom, dad. Sorry, dad. Mom. And there was a battle over simply how to describe me. So for quite a while, I was described only as Puerto Rican. Why is this important? Because if I'm not African American, then you can discount my opinion on race issues, including reparations for slavery. So it was important to some editor on Wikipedia to just exclude the fact, well documented, easy to verify that I am half African American. And then someone else who probably either just cared about the facts or was a fan of me put it back with requisite footnotes and sources, and so it's been accurate ever since. But is it like ultimately, when two editors, if there's one editor who disagrees with one other editor, who decides who gets that?
- [22:17]
C
Basically the more powerful editor in the sense of the one who understands how to use the rules and the principles better to their advantage, the one who's able to call in a friend somehow, however they do that off platform, or they message or they just attract the attention, or someone who has the favor of an admin, and eventually the admin is going to make the call. But that could be a decision that is easily biased. I mean, at the end of the day, we don't know who any of the editors are. And of course, there's a big benefit to that. For the open expression of the Internet, it was a core feature. But when it comes to being able to define somebody's life, not just their life, in your case, your actual literal identity as a human being, and you don't know who's doing that, in your case, it happened to work out, which is great. But in many, many cases, those types of things don't actually resolve in that way. They just stay there forever, and that person is forever considered. In your case, it would have been Puerto Rican. Some cases it would have been like Andy Ngo, the journalist, conservative journalist, or journal, independent journalist, whatever you want to call him, he's a journalist. Wikipedia has branded him a far right social media influencer. And that was done in this very operationalized method. It was very deliberate, it was very well executed over not just months, but years. Two or three, maybe five dedicated editors pulled it off. Now it's permanent. That's forever for him. We can talk about it, but it's not going to change on Wikipedia, it's not going to change on Google until Wikipedia changes it. And AI is going to learn from the same entry about him. So for individuals this becomes extremely problematic. Then you have the same effect on a geopolitical level where you have editors who are exploiting the same vulnerability we're talking about. You get anonymity with the ability to influence a platform that in turn influences the biggest information platforms in history. Basically Google and AI together and all you need is three or four people on a given topic and you change the outcome of across the Internet. It is a high leverage exploitation of this vulnerability.
- [24:40]
B
So who are the administrators who would end up arbitrating in the case of a dispute,
- [24:47]
C
who they are? Literally we don't know either. Like they're completely anonymous. They're anonymous also to Wikipedia.
- [24:54]
B
How do they become administrators? Like who decides?
- [24:57]
C
There are other kinds of administrators that can make other users into administrators. Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia, he calls this the power 62. There's 62 editors that have a number of extremely high level administrative rights and abilities. And these guys have disproportionate influence over the site. They can track IP addresses, they have a lot of, they have a lot of insight into user data. And there's others that among them can sort of benight another editor into an admin. So this very kind of theoretically self correcting system, but it doesn't self correct when the weight of influence seeking on the site, the weight of active operations that are being conducted on the site that appear to have the sophistication of something that's government backed. When you have let's say 20 to 30,000 citations of Iranian state media on there. When you have the same effect with Chinese media, Chinese state media, hundreds of thousands of citations that are Chinese state media are now being recycled from Wikipedia into AI and their articles and as legitimate sources. So this is like it just breaks down on so many levels where that exploitation appears and gets exploited.
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B
That's really interesting that you have. So basically, so how do the administrators. Is it like someone who is a super high frequency editor for years and years and years and develops a reputation for fairness and honesty as decided by some administrator with A face and a name and then is anointed as one of these anonymous admins. I remember reading an article about that guy who's made the most Wikipedia edits of all time. I forget his name. Maybe you remember his name, but that's the kind of person that would be. Is that the kind of person that would be elevated?
- [27:01]
C
Yes, it would be an editor with certain amount of experience and clout and at least again in theory they would have some standing on the site that would motivate someone. And then you have admins who have been made admins years and years and years ago. And it's sort of like you can have they describe in Wikipedia as tools. You can have your admin tools removed and revoked and sometimes they do, but again that's even very rare and admins can get away with quite a lot and still retain those powers and those abilities.
- [27:37]
B
So this hearkens back to my first question, my opening paradox. What kind of person spends all day litigating facts on Wikipedia for free? Presumably, right, because people don't get paid, right?
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C
Do they?
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B
But they don't get paid by Wikipedia.
- [27:59]
C
No, they don't get paid by Wikipedia. That's true.
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B
And they're anonymous, so they don't actually get the kind of status that could translate into real world benefits.
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C
Nobody knows they can sell their services if they want. It's something that is extremely widespread on Wikipedia. I've found myself, I think well over 200 and that's extremely low balled number agencies, these are like independently operating businesses that all they do is edit Wikipedia for money. So if you're paying the agency, the agency has to be paying an editor and or an administrator. This happens all the time, all across the site. It happens in many different ways. It happens in what they call black hat editors which are unpaid illicitly. They're breaking the terms of service. And then you have white hat which declare the conflict of interest. But the New York Times has hired them a white hat editor. NBC News has hired them, the government has hired them. So there is a lot of payment running through Wikipedia for sure, on the order of tens of millions of dollars. If it goes beyond that, I would not be surprised.
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B
That's interesting. Okay, so let's talk about some of the specific instances of bias that you've written about, in particular related to Israel, Palestine and post October 7th.
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C
So what we found in some of the research, I was contacted by a few sources on this and the story is about this group called the Gang of 40. It's about three dozen editors who are decidedly determinedly anti Israel. In virtually all their editing, they've edited a combined made 1 million edits to around 10,000 articles having to do with Israel Palestine. And that includes everything from whitewashing the Hamas 1988 genocidal charter. From articles they'll just go through delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. They'll do the same thing with Palestinian terror attacks. So attacks by Hamas, in some cases Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they would just mass delete. They get very subtle. These guys are very smart as well. A lot of them seem to have an academic bent. So they'll go through very deep historical articles and make subtle changes that change the framing. For example, there was an article called Hellenistic Judea, referencing the land they changed to Hellenistic Palestine. The article had been stable for years.
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B
So this is in that Greek Hellenistic period. Yeah, but wasn't it not called Palestine until the Romans started calling it Palestine? Wouldn't that have been later?
- [30:47]
C
That would be my understanding. I'm not an expert of the history of the Holy Land. Yeah, I'm sure there was a good argument to be made that that's the case, that it probably would have been called historically Hellenistic Judea. But I'm sure they found an article in some journal that made the case about it. And maybe that journal was not exactly mainstream, but because it's considered an academic journal, they can use it to justify the claim, the change. And because there's three or four people who are guarding the page and specifically guarding they're patrolling that particular title, they can just keep it locked. The same thing happened with the Zionism article where the Gang of 40, a few of the leaders of this Gang of 40 that I reported on, gain control of the lead section of the article on Zionism. So Zionism, this article would be the most important resource online for defining Zionism to the world. They grab control of the first few paragraphs, which is the most important part of the article. And they basically changed a part of a sentence that quite clearly makes Zionism equivalent to ethnic cleansing. In the second sentence of the article, I believe, and then locked it. They put what they called a moratorium on it for one year that nobody could touch it. So they froze it in time. How they did that, it's not quite clear. They just grabbed this concept from the toolbox of a moratorium. They did it. These are the kinds of things that are happening on a moment by moment basis. It's happening right now. If I were to open up my computer and start looking around, I'd See them making changes to articles about Israel, about the Golan Heights, creating new articles with titles that make an ideological point. There was an article I just came across created days after October 7th that is something like instances of when the IDF denied a claim of an attack that was eventually proven to be true. Like that's all basically the title of the article is that ridiculous. That directly an ideological tool they dozens of pages like that that they create.
- [32:55]
B
And of course there would be no analogous article in reverse. Like instances of attacks that Hamas has denied or Iran has denied and later turned out to be true because it's too specific and it's too much clearly tilted at one side.
- [33:11]
C
Right. I would imagine in this particular case that that equivalent article doesn't exist. There may be other cases where they. Where there have been others created. But for the most part you see this major shift where articles that have been stable for literally years and years and years after October 7th, everything starts to change. And this is actually something that going back to our early conversation about individuals being attacked, I'm sure you know either of or know personally. Naz Daily Nazir Yassin, who is a.
- [33:48]
B
I've heard of him. Yep, I've seen his content for sure.
- [33:50]
C
Yeah. So a major content creator. He is a Israeli Arab. You could call him a Palestinian Israeli, whatever configuration. He's an Arab guy who comes from Israel. And after October 7, he came out very supportive of Israel and said in an amazing tweet that he felt like he is now. He used to be Arab Israeli, but now he's Israeli Arab. He's putting the Israeli part first. He feels connected to his country. And the moment he did that, his page changed entirely. It was attacked. He became instead of an entrepreneur and this massive creator, he became an influencer. Same kind of reach shift as Andy know. And he was attacked specifically for wanting for advocating for normalization. That was the attack that was considered a bad thing. Normalization. This is a point he. Yes, Nussir makes. He made with me in a conversation. Normalization used to be this sort of standard of what we wanted from the Middle East. We want normalization between countries, between Israel and the Arab countries, between Israel and the Palestinians. Because that was a classically liberal idea. But Wikipedia, like the media, has lurched far to the left and within the leftist framework. Normalization is exactly what they don't want in the Middle east as it has to do with Israel. They want global intifada and they want the conflict to continue so that Israel loses it's very zero sum. And that's kind of the cultural environment that shifted after October 7th on Wikipedia. That became much more pronounced and then that became operationalized.
- [35:33]
A
Now finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers and this is the big thing. Compare costs upfront. The big picture More transparent pricing benefits everyone, and These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commitment
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- [37:04]
B
It seems like there's at least two problems. One is people editing and reframing and actually committing sort of lies of commission.
- [37:16]
C
Right?
- [37:17]
B
And those are the easy ones. To identify the problem there is just if there's 100 people working to insert lies into Wikipedia articles or take out unflattering truths, do you have 100 people on the other side working in the opposite direction? Maybe not. But then there's the deeper problem of sort of curation. You could say like I know in you know, if you wanted to go to Wikipedia and find out about the transatlantic slave trade, there's going to be just a bevy of information there and there's going to be a main page and there's going to be a lot of related pages related to subtopics of the transatlantic slave trade. If you want to learn about the trans Saharan slave trade, there's Just less there. There's less primary source books. There are fewer primary source documents in the first place for historians to look at. There's less interest in the topic in general, less knowledge of the topic from the Wikipedia anonymous admins. And so, you know, and God forbid you want to learn about slavery in Korea, it's like there is a Wikipedia page, it's just like pretty short. And that doesn't really reflect Wikipedia's bias so much as the overall interests of the whole global academic community. Like it's actually tough to find a single full book on slavery in Korea. And they had slavery for a thousand years and it was only abolished around 1900. So it's like a perfectly worthy topic of academic study. But it's, I kid you not, difficult to find like a full cover to cover book that's like just on that topic, trivially easy to do for American slavery, slavery in Brazil, slavery almost in any, you know, slavery in Jamaica, you can find many volumes on it and so forth. And so in some way Wikipedia is also suffering from the generic biases that academics around the world have been way more interested in discussing certain topics than and way less interested in discussing others. And that sort of just reflects in general knowledge and in what Wikipedia pages even exist for us to fight over in the first place. So there's another aspect. So you mentioned earlier that one of the big reasons this matters more and more is because all of the LLMs are trained in part on Wikipedia. Obviously they look at Wikipedia, they look at the sources cited in Wikipedia's claims. Obviously they're trained on a lot of other material too. But at the margin, if Wikipedia gets influenced in one direction or another, LLMs get influenced in that same direction. And I'll give you an example. Recently, recently this guy, Zed Jelani on Twitter, he made a bunch of claims about a trip that I went to. I went to Israel a few years ago. I actually talked about it on the podcast at the time, in my, maybe my most viewed podcast of all time with Dr. Benny Morris, the great historian of the Israel Palestine conflict. I had gone to Israel probably a year prior on a government paid junket trip. And on that trip there were supporters of Israel, there were also critics of Israel. And we went around the country. And obviously this is one of those cases where the government would not pay for this trip if they didn't think it would be overall beneficial to how these journalists view Israel. So to that extent, it's a light propaganda trip. At the same time, governments all around the world do this and There is a difference between going to a quote unquote propaganda trip in a country that has free speech and you can meet a Supreme Court justice, record your conversation and ask them the hardest possible question about the occupied territories. And nothing ever bad would happen to you as a journalist. So you have total freedom. You're not in North Korea being shown fake grocery stores. So there is anyway, there's propaganda tours and then there's propaganda tours. And so that was my sort of explanation of that. Anyway, this guy, Zed Jelani, he had friends on the trip and he just decided, woke up one day and decided to attack me on Twitter and say, when Coleman was in Israel, he refused to see Palestinians. And I was like, what? That never happened and doesn't sound like me. And so he basically got the details of this wrong. Where there was a separate trip that other people organized a couple days prior to the trip we all went on where they went and saw the occupied territories, and it was planned at the last minute, so I wasn't able to come. Whereas the trip I had gone on and that we all were able to make had been planned for, you know, seven, eight months in advance. So most of us didn't go on that earlier trip because it was hastily planned. So that's what happened. There were two separate trips, and he was portraying it as if it were one trip. And we had the opportunity to talk to a bunch of Palestinians, and I just said, I, you know, stayed in the hotel room with my arms folded, which is ridiculous. And everyone who went on the trip defended me on Twitter. But the thought that I really had is I've been dealing with people lying about me on Twitter for years. Generally, as I've gotten older, I respond less and less because I simply don't care. However, in the age of LLMs, I actually do respond very neutrally with the facts as they actually happened, way more so that the LLMs actually have the facts rather than to persuade anyone in the public who's watching right now. Because I understand in two years somebody's going to look this up on grok, it's going to come up, hey, did Coleman refuse to see Palestinians on an Israel trip? And if Grok doesn't have my version of events corroborated by other people on the trip to look back on, then it's very possible they'll present it as if it's like an unsettled issue or like a legitimate accusation as opposed to what it is, which is total bs. So, increasingly, and I think Tyler Cowen said something like, this, he like, he like writes for the LLMs, you know, for posterity. Because everything you write now is being fed into this super intelligence that's going to be sort of educating humanity for the, for hundreds of years to come.
- [43:55]
C
Yeah, well that's, you know, this is basically what we're talking about when it comes to, to data poisoning, because people understand like you're, you're sort of approaching this in good faith and someone who wants to literally set the record straight. There are lots of other people out there and lots of more than just people, groups, countries, whatever, other agencies that are operating that seek to do the exact opposite. They don't want to set the record straight, they want to scramble the record. And they understand that when they do so they can affect the same superintelligence you're trying to affect, but they can do it in a way that is highly, highly informed as to how these processes work, that is really well resourced and that is very dogged and dedicated. So over the course of not just months, but years, years or sometimes it is months, but working editors who are working eight hours a day on something, clearly not doing this in good faith, clearly working for some unseen purpose, and they're affecting the same LLM downstream that you are. You're just trying to do it in a way that tells your side of a story. They're trying to do it in a way that manipulates information, contaminates it. We see the same thing. This is not just Wikipedia, the same, the same kind of mechanism as on Reddit. Because Reddit is highly trusted by LLMs as well, the data is considered really good data. And because Reddit, like Wikipedia are one of the few large scale social media platforms that are text intensive but are not owned by another, by a big tech company that's trying to create its own models. So they're free agents to sell their data to all the LLM companies, to the producers of these AI systems and, and that sort of increases their impact. The difference I think, between the two is that on Reddit we still have this notion that these are users expressing views and opinions. On Wikipedia, we've been acculturated to the idea that what we see there is neutral and objective, almost as if it doesn't have an author, because when you actually look at the interface, there is no author. It doesn't say this sentence, this sentence by user X and this sentence, the sentence by user Y or by Tom. It just presents it as authorless. And that gives a cultural impression of not just neutrality, but something that is really approaching ground truth. And this is something that Wikipedia itself also began to push in 2016, 2017, when we had the fake news epidemic that Hillary Clinton declared in front of Congress in December 2016. And you're opening up this gap of disinformation because it's supposedly coming back to our Russiagate discussion. Disinformation was supposedly responsible for the first election, supposedly, according to Clinton, the dnc, the Obama administration, outgoing Clinton lost the election because there was social media disinformation. Cambridge Analytica, we remember that story as well as all this other stuff coming from the Trumpet Trump campaign. But in reality, what we saw there was, again, it was a case of information poisoning. And now what we're seeing is that stretching into the future, where these are now, these systems that are shaping AI and how AI will unfold over the next 10 to 20 years, and they're being manipulated by small groups of people who understand how the systems work.
- [47:35]
B
So if Jews supposedly control the world and control the media, why can't they figure out how to fight back and control the narrative on Wikipedia?
- [47:47]
C
That's a great question. I have no idea what the answer is. I don't know. I mean, you would think that if a side was being attacked and dominated so badly on such an important platform, you would think that there would be some kind of mounted resistance. I really wonder what the answer is. I don't know what it is, but it is my job as a journalist, I feel, is to document what I see there. And kind of, again, coming back to earlier in the conversation, of course, I'm a person, I'm a journalist. I have my own interests, I have my own values. I approach this in my way. And I would invite someone else to do the same thing I'm doing from their point of view as well, which hopefully there are people doing it. But I think a lot of the answer to the question, though, if I kind of step back for a second, comes down to the culture on Wikipedia. This came out of the Bay Area for most of the site's life. It was in the Bay Area, it was a culture, a very, very progressive culture. And I think it was more classically liberal and libertarian in the beginning of the site. And then over the years it became progressively progressive. And now it's, you know, so much of the politics that, that you can feel in these socially, culturally or politically resonant entries or articles are, are left wing politics. And they're, they're, that's, that's what's dominating. And that tends not to favor Israel it tends not to favor the idea of the Jews as a nation, more as something that is closer to a religious thread in the quilt, more of an American view of things. So it's probably the culture.
- [49:35]
B
Yeah. I mean, I actually tweeted about this years ago because I noticed that every conservative commentator, including very mainstream conservatives like Ben Shapiro, was named as a conservative in the first sentence of their Wikipedia article, which I have no problem with. Ben Shapiro is conservative. Proudly. Nothing wrong with describing him that way. But I would notice that the equivalent liberal was never described using the word liberal or progressive. So, like Ezra Klein, who is like, definitely liberal. I think he would absolutely cop to that, proudly. As Ben Shapiro would with conservative, would be described just as a writer and journalist, right?
- [50:20]
C
Yes.
- [50:21]
B
And I went through, like, 20 examples of people that I kind of picked, people I thought of symmetrically as equally liberal, equally conservative, and 201. Every single conservative was named as a conservative and every single liberal wasn't. And I thought this is actually very deep, profound bias, because it's a little bit similar to the point that critical race theorists used to make about American society. They would say, like, okay, you think of the default American. Who are you picturing? I don't think you're picturing a Hispanic woman. Like, you're picturing a white guy. Right. But you don't have to call him a white guy. Right. It's like whatever you think of as normal influences a lot of how you think and see the world. What is the default? Oh, well, the default intellectual is liberal. The default writer, the default journal is a liberal. Conservatives need to be named because they're sort of a special case of weird, different. They have an ideology. Right. Whereas the liberal journalist is just a journalist. He has no ideology. Therefore, it doesn't need to be included that he's a liberal in the first sentence. And of course that is that when the ideology is invisible, it becomes more powerful because you don't see it as such.
- [51:41]
C
Yeah, exactly. It's the lens. It's the lens.
- [51:44]
B
Yeah, it's the lens.
- [51:46]
C
It's not seen because it's not an object apart from the site. That ideology of essentially, broadly speaking, the left is what Wikipedia sees the world through. And you can get a sense of what it would look like to change that lens if you go to Grokopedia, because if you take the same article on Wikipedia and Grokopedia, then they're going to look really different. And even if you disagree with what's written on Grokopedia and agree with what is On Wikipedia, you're still going to see that there are two ways to present the issue. And Wikipedia is not the way, it's not neutral. And this is again like the founding mythos of Wikipedia has to do with neutrality. I'm not sure that that's what the founders really were seeking, but that's now what it's become. It's that this is about neutral information and that's not true. That in itself is not a neutral statement. We know it's not. And David Rosado, who is a really great machine learning scientist out in New Zealand, he did this study. It's kind of what got me into reporting on this stuff. He analyzed language on Wikipedia and he showed that if you look at language and entries having to do with politicians in the United States who are on the right, they were more likely to be associated with negative sentiment. And if you looked at ones on the left, they were more likely to be associated with positive sentiment. That held true for House Representatives, members of Senate presidents, Supreme Court Justices and journalists as well. So this is all there. And I think probably by now a lot of people recognize it. I think what we don't recognize as much is a, what we've been talking about, how much this is actually affecting the systems that are shaping our future. And then if we back up and go the other direction. You were kind of touching on this earlier. What you're seeing is that Wikipedia, you made this point about academia, right? There's not a lot of scholarship about trans Saharan slavery and there's not a lot of scholarship about Korean slavery. There's a ton about Transatlantic and Atlantic slavery. However, and you're seeing like Wikipedia is expressing the bias of academia, which is true, but what we also have to understand is that the two things are very meshed together. Like academia and academic papers are part of the lifeblood of Wikipedia. It's part of the sourcing infrastructure. But for academia, Wikipedia is a window into the world. It's where all these papers, all the Marxist stuff, all the critical theory stuff gets put into this gigantic shop front where otherwise it wouldn't, it just wouldn't interface with the world and with the Internet in that way as kind of neutral claims that it does currently.
- [54:43]
B
So I mean, we've been heaping a lot of criticisms on Wikipedia, I think rightly so. But to play the other side of this, isn't it still true that Wikipedia is quite often better than the average so called expert that might have an explainer in a magazine or an article and judged not against the ideal of Objectivity, but against the actual alternatives. How bad is Wikipedia?
- [55:15]
C
I really think it depends on what. So if you're talking about, you're just super interested in some 1960s Porsche that was really special, and there's an article about it, and it's going to give you all this great information and photos and like somebody. Somebody spent their time doing that. Like, that is actually amazing. And that's great that that's there. Or if I want to like looking at my library and there's an author, I'm like, you know, Anthony Trollope. I want to read more, I want to learn more about this guy's biography. I will end up on Wikipedia, there's no question. The problem is that what is happening on the site today was never part of the original vision of how this would unfold. It was a much more naive time back then. We're talking about 25 years ago in Internet history. That's the entirety of the public Internet, basically, like 2001 till today. And the site technically hasn't updated much, but much more importantly, the structure, the infrastructure, the culture, the way that they monitor the site, the way that they administer the site has not changed. And instead, Wikimedia foundation, the NGO that owns the site, has Again, this is that 2016, 2017 period, reimagined themselves consciously as a social justice movement, where they consider now their core mission to be the pursuit of knowledge equity. That's their terminology, and for them to be part of what they call global knowledge infrastructure. So they are pushing a certain kind of idea of knowledge, one that's rooted in concepts like equity. And they promoted DEI. They spent a ton of money on DEI, at least $10 million or $9 million. What I'm saying is that, yes, all that value is there, all that value of these, let's say, 6 million plus pages or probably more, where you can learn things, where you find things you never thought you would find. But that last percent is doing so much damage. And the reason is because the oversight at Wikipedia has failed oversight mechanisms at every level. At the level of the foundation, the ngo, and at the level of the arbitration committee, that's their Supreme Court. There's 10 of them. There's 10 of these arbitrators who are active right now for 7 million articles. How could that possibly work? There's 600 active admins for 7 million articles. 7 million. It's hard to wrap our minds around the scale of that. How can 600 people patrol 7 million pieces of rich information on which there could be dozens of arguments Flaring at any one moment. You can't. It's impossible. So we are at a place in our society where not just technology has changed, our very society has changed because of technology. And this one critical piece of our quote unquote knowledge infrastructure has not changed at all. And again, when we think about Grokopedia and what Elon has done, why it's so interesting is because humans are writing the source material, but a machine is curating and condensing it for us in a way that's determined, attempting to be determined, to be neutral in as much as it can be.
- [58:39]
B
So I found that Grok is really good at fact checking tweets. Community notes like Grok combined with community notes has been fantastic for the pursuit of truth and the fight against bullshit. First, tell me if you agree with that and then second, tell me about Grokopedia. Overall, is Grokopedia better than Wikipedia? And if so, why?
- [59:08]
C
In terms of the Grok fact checking and I think this really core modality of community notes on X, which is, I think it is, in a way it's not a massive game changer, but it's an important step forward, I would say, having that ability for people to be fact checked in public, not by like four people sitting in an office somewhere, you don't know who they are, what they're doing, but by a group of people who are actively doing this and voting on the outcomes. And that kind of thing probably will lead to better outcomes. Could also be manipulated, of course, but I think in the case of X, you have here a company that needs to succeed. It has to make money, it has to win the trust of advertisers, it has to balance competing needs. And I think that generally requires much more engagement by management, by their product people. There's been a lag, of course, and X is by far not perfect. There is a lot going wrong on X every single day. But it's improving. That's the thing, it's actually improving. And you can see they're making steps to improve it. Comparing that to Wikipedia, where we're talking about the stasis that I described before, I think it's better as Grokopedia. The articles that I've seen that are important to me, that I've done sort of side by sides with, are way better on Grokopedia. Way better. I did a lot of COVID reporting. Covid origin, the lab leak stuff. I reported on that story for a year and a half, two years. I know enough to know that lab leak is not a conspiracy theory. I know that it has serious scientific substance behind it. Leading experts around the world who are convinced that it is likely, then no one's saying that it's 100% slam dunk. But if you go to the Wikipedia article, it's going to say the word conspiracy theory dozens of times and throughout the articles. Not even that long of an article.
- [61:04]
B
Is that still true to this day?
- [61:06]
C
That's still true. Yeah.
- [61:07]
B
Yeah.
- [61:08]
C
And it's in the lead section as well. It relies one of those really important, like first instances where it's claiming to be a conspiracy theory. The citation back again, back to the academia stuff. The citation is from a paper written by two professors of literature. So because they're writing about some sort of literary analysis of conspiracy theories. And this one, by literary standards, this fits. But that's not a scientific theory, that's a literary theory. And. And then you go to Grokopedia and it's just like it treats it as a serious topic that is not being polarized, it's not being stigmatized through this terminology. And you're like, you know, I use this metaphor often, but it's kind of like coming into a. From a dim, dim, dank room into an open space. You're like, oh, okay, this is what this could look like. And you see that again and again and again. How this is going to play out over time, we still don't know. It's unknown. I think the important thing though is that Wikipedia was all about crowdsourcing the information through individual editors. I think where we're going is we can start to crowdsource information from different pedia platforms. Grokopedia now being at least an alternative. At least there is a diversity of viewpoint among the different major encyclopedia platforms, which we have never had in the history of the Internet. We have only had one. We've had a knowledge monopoly for 25 years. And in year 26, it was appropriate, I think, to have a bit more diversity. And I hope we'll see more and more of that kind of thing. I don't think Grokopedia needs to be the last. It can be the second in a string of who knows how many major encyclopedias that all get drawn from by various people and various systems.
- [62:51]
B
Okay, Ashley Rainsberg, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [62:54]
C
Thank you, Coleman.
- [62:56]
A
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