As the golden era of the information age deviates into a turbulent period tarnished by the onset and prevalence of junk content, no source material is safe from the blatant politicization and revisionism of professional instigators. Platforms branded as encyclopedias inviting the global public with open arms to create accounts is a recipe for disaster, and now administrators are behind the eight-ball in containing a Three Mile Island debacle. With the reality of instantaneous change a perpetual theme of the digital universe, the entire spectrum of informational nodes, (from what are construed as news sites to digital periodicals, and even certain journals), are vulnerable to the prevarications of disruptive actors forwarding an agenda, and brutally indifferent to truth. These include news sites, the aforementioned digital periodicals and certain journals.
Social media is a lost cause. The onslaught of leftist radicalism overwhelmed an already uneven battlefield from the launch of F***book, as extremist “techviduals” dispatched multiple online personas (most phony) through guerilla tactics, until the company required stricter verification protocol. However, the deck was already stacked against half of the political belief ecosystem. Since Zuckerberg’s lazy response to combat fake accounts, intellectual terrorists have expanded their devious franchise to hijacking and flooding popular community-run periodicals with misinformation and rhetoric, including the largest online encyclopedia. The prehistorically prodigious Wikipedia, now 21 years old, is on the front line of a cultural war, as the keyboard cowboys, including Chinese intelligence agents, are swarming to sign-up and wreck havoc. Though the website has a spotty track record in employing efficient verification efforts, and visitors are cautioned to take each article with an Oprah-sized grain of salt, despite the criticism, the portal has a reputation as a decent source for public information.
This is a problem, as the shared belief that reading between the lines may reveal at least a partial truth, only encourages the hopelessly dizzying cycle of edits in a convoluted fluidic cycle of seconds, minutes, and hours. Like salvos of gunshots fired, enemy detractors such as Beijing and Wikipedia volunteers exchange acts of distortion and restoration, as common knowledge sits atop the precarious towering summit of a Dubai skyscraper, and the energy expended is not insignificant to cause a minor singularity across the space-time continuum.
Wikipedia’s model for posting a topic or editing content is disturbingly easy and simple. Anyone with an email address can apply for a free account and receive editing privileges almost instantly. Based on the initial dreams of an unregulated and self-policing environment of a “free” internet, edits are encouraged as the community relies on a peer-to-peer collaboration to maintain a minimum baseline of readability. The domain lacks the budget of a F***book grade Big Brother moderation army of bots and paid activists. As a result, the Chinese have perfected exploiting this built-in loophole to wage a perpetual battle on fact checking by deploying the efforts of full-scale propaganda team, faster than sensible corrections can be made. Like being stuck in quicksand, truth is being drowned out by coercive indoctrination. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) information specialists blessed with university level English proficiency are indirectly teaming with social justice warriors to make outlandish claims on pages devoted to history and non-controversial topics, such as an article profiling a city.
The BBC reports, the digital encyclopedia has barred seven users with direct ties to the Chinese government for continuous postings of subjective pro-Beijing rhetoric, which includes passages scrutinizing supporters of Hong Kong independence. Another twelve members of the electronic espionage team were slapped on the wrist as the website revoked their administrative privileges.
The invasion of Wikipedia by rogue information techs is part of a shrewd campaign by the PLA spanning social media, Communist part news portals, and commenting forums. The diabolical plan is to provoke chaos through cultural internecine, and build the prestige of the regime, in rebranding the government as benevolent though a militarized cyber disinformation campaign designed to discredit US and Western Europe foreign policy and business practices. Domestic muckrakers are only adding gasoline to the already blazing inferno of divisiveness through an unrelenting bombardment of reckless platitudes devoid of decency and posted under the pretense of moral superiority. Within this dense jungle of sanctimony of extremism, it is shocking that Mount Rushmore has not received a socialistic overhaul and replace honorable patriots with AOC, Bernie, Hillary, and Pelosi in a virtue signaling facelift, thankfully not visible at cruising altitude on cross-continental high altitude airways.
Salvation exists within the pages of printed periodicals, but the digital information age spurred by the tech lobby has society in a bind.
Sections of Wikipedia hijacked by woke ideology, have already corrupted the fragile infrastructure of the site. Critics question the integrity of the open door editing policy, which encourages anonymous individuals to tinker with the complexion of an article, regardless of expertise, education, or political ulterior motive. To help combat the constant graffiti of mistruths, the platform has a system in place with a “history” tab, showing the entire ledger of citations and edits made to an article since birth. With the increased influx of nefarious characters, such as members of the People’s Liberation Army, and the creation of pages covering new subjects and ideas, the domain has added tools for flagging egregiously politicized content, though it may be too little, too late.
Browsing through the Santa Barbara wiki, reveals that the current city possesses a rich tapestry of history influenced by indigenous peoples, and Spanish and Mexican settlers. It also highlights the municipality’s “Social Activism” scene, including a blip on the history of Occupy Santa Cruz protests, a group that had ties to the international Occupy movement. The beauty and curse of Wikipedia is that the deliberately misplaced section was flagged and tagged under the new directives to improve accountability and transparency, yet similar issues remain unresolved on countless pages. Disappointingly, other than the generic warning to readers being posted, the politicized content has not been modified or removed in over a year since the alert was added, which is a disheartening indictment that some changes are for the worst. Since the inception of the Santa Barbara city page in 2002, site custodians have interacted over 1000 times with digital red pens and erasers in making edits and notes, yet have opted to crater to partisan politics.
As timber prices ascend and books, especially encyclopedias become scarce, the susceptibility to revisionism for insidious purposes overwhelms the few people left who care enough to defend truth against toxic hyperbole. The memory hole hungers for the printed and written as the societal engineers are willing to feed the beast the savory main course of the future in order to subdue the present.
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