Anyone who’s been to college in the Wikipedia era, especially anything above the associate degree level, knows that’s the last reference resource professors will accept from students when writing research papers.
That’s because Wikipedia, which is kind of, sort of, self-edited contains gigabytes of false, phony, or erroneous information. The site isn’t peer reviewed by any means, and it’s just not a reliable source of information.
And yet, a new censorship tool being introduced by Facebook will intentionally or inadvertently rely heavily on Wikipedia for the establishment of ‘credible’ news and information sites.
Breitbart Tech notes:
Facebook received a lot of attention for overt censorship last week. But the social network is engaging in covert suppression of independent media too — most recently with its introduction of “Click-Gap,” a way of favoring established websites and suppressing non-established ones.
Here’s how this latest bald-faced censorship scheme will work.
Click-Gap will work to penalize news and information sites that have yet to establish “authority” outside of Facebook, where ‘authority’ is assessed based on the number of clicks sites get from sources other than the platform, like establishment media sources.
Facebook’s “VP of integrity” and “VP of news integrity” officially explain it this way on the platform’s blog:
Click-Gap looks for domains with a disproportionate number of outbound Facebook clicks compared to their place in the web graph. This can be a sign that the domain is succeeding on News Feed in a way that doesn’t reflect the authority they’ve built outside it and is producing low-quality content.
This is huge because Facebook has become a primary traffic driver for new websites of all kinds, including, of course, news sites. But, as Breitbart Tech reports, Click-Gap appears to have been designed to promote websites that managed to build up their readership and following before social media became a thing. So the system will naturally favor the older, establishment media outlets like CNN, Washington Post, The New York Times, etc. — some of the biggest drivers of fake news in the era of POTUS Donald Trump. (Related: POTUS Trump blasts ‘illegal’ social media BIAS and censorship, vows actions.)
Of course, this is precisely the kind of scenario the mainstream media outlets want; anything they can do to shut out independent media competition, the better.
Conspiring to shut out alternative, independent voices with an encyclopedia of propaganda
As for how Wikipedia factors into all of this, Breitbart Tech notes that Click Gap will favor the establishment press in another way.
“One of the largest sources for links and citations of news sources is Wikipedia, the Leftist-dominated ‘online encyclopedia,’” Breitbart noted. “But conservative sources…are frequently blacklisted as ‘unreliable’ on the site.” Hence, they are not used, which is ironic given the fact that Wikipedia itself is considered ‘unreliable’ by academia using primarily mainstream media sources.
Facebook would be working in tandem with another big tech giant that also loves to censor conservative content: Google, the world’s No. 1 search engine. Can you guess which pages Google produces the most when it comes to searches?
That’s right — Wikipedia pages. In fact, these frequently appear at the top of Google search pages, making them much more frequently selected by users. And again, since Wikipedia itself feeds so many other mainstream news sites, this, too, will factor into the sites that Click Gap and its underlying algorithm will favor.
Anything to crush conservative and independent media because the establishment media cannot compete with us on its own.
Case in point: CNN is now reporting that Democrats in Congress are ‘training’ themselves to appear on Fox News, because it is a ratings behemoth compared to, well, CNN, and the rest of the joke cable news networks.
It must have hurt to report that.
Read more about the rising censorship of the tech giants at TechGiants.news and Censorship.news.
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