Originally published March 24 2015
Total hypocrisy: Wikipedia sues NSA while censoring truth and promoting corporate propaganda
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) In what many purveyors of truth see as blatant hypocrisy, the Wikimedia Foundation, which founded the Internet-based, user-edited Wikipedia encyclopedia site, among others, has filed suit against the National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging mass electronic surveillance conducted by both in the name of fighting terrorism was illegal.
The suit, enjoined by eight others, further alleges that the NSA spying violated U.S. constitutional guarantees of free speech and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
As reported by the BBC:
The scale of the monitoring carried out by the NSA has been revealed in documents made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years. Some of those papers show the NSA tapped the net's backbone network to siphon off data. The backbone is made up of high-speed cables that link big ISPs and key transit points on the net.
"By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy," said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog post, BBC reported. "By violating our users' privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people's ability to create and understand knowledge."
Bias against politically incorrect subjects
Tretikov, along with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, further stated in an op-ed in that NSA spying "has a chilling effect" on knowledge exchange:
The harm to Wikimedia and the hundreds of millions of people who visit our websites is clear: Pervasive surveillance has a chilling effect. It stifles freedom of expression and the free exchange of knowledge that Wikimedia was designed to enable.
Critics of Wikipedia - which, by the way, is banned as a reference source by an increasing number of colleges and universities - say its founder's quest for truth and knowledge rings hollow, given the site's distinct bias against subjects like homeopathic medicine and any other "politically incorrect" subject.
In fact, the entry on the Wikipedia Homeopathy page is distinctly critical of the medical practice:
Homeopathy lacks biological plausibility, and its axioms are contradicted by scientific facts. The postulated mechanisms of action of homeopathic remedies are both scientifically implausible and not physically possible. Although some clinical trials produce positive results, systematic reviews reveal that this is because of chance, flawed research methods, and reporting bias. Continued homeopathic practice, despite the evidence that it does not work, has been criticized as unethical because it discourages the use of effective treatments...
In fact, there are a number of homeopathic physicians - and their patients - who would disagree with this "finding." In addition, as this web site notes, a meta-analysis of 25 studies in 1991 by three professors of medicine from the Netherlands, none of them homeopaths, reported in the British Medical Journal that "the amount of positive results" via homeopathic treatments "came as a surprise to us."
And there are countless examples of Wikipedia bias, as well as outright fabrication:
-- Dean Esmay, managing editor of A Voice For Men, a men's rights web site, published this essay in April 2014, decrying Wikipedia's many publishing issues:
It used to be that with Wikipedia, all you had to worry about were errors written by people who didn't know what they were talking about. Nowadays you don't just have to contend with mistakes on Wikipedia, though. You also have to contend with overt censorship, bullying, and ideological thuggery-all of it invisible on the front pages of Wikipedia, but which can be seen on Talk, Revision, and Blacklist pages all over Wikipedia, by the people who control what the general public sees on the front pages.
Esmay further noted that Wikipedia editors routinely "blacklist, censor, block, and vandalize" his organization's web page, which he sees as being ideologically driven.
-- In a 2008 National Review Online piece reprinted by CBSNews.com, Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe and author of "The Deniers," decried Wikipedia's pro-climate change bias.
Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a "scientific consensus" confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. ...
In theory Wikipedia is a "people's encyclopedia" written and edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.
Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.
-- Here at Natural News, our editor, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has exposed how Jon Entine, a pro-GMO front man and shill for the biotech industry, has also served as a Wikipedia vandal, who used the site to smear research scientist Gilles-Eric Saralini. The French scientist found that GM maize and Roundup at very low doses caused organ damage, tumors and premature death in rats over the long term, but Entine abused Wikipedia to delete "balancing information, for example, about the scientific support for Seralini's study and the conflicts of interest among critics of the study," Adams wrote.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31813289
http://www.nytimes.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
www.homeopathic.com
http://www.avoiceformen.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
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