Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.
"I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation," Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. "Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That's what makes reports of Wikipedia's systemic bias especially troubling."
Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that "researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias." Cruz alleged that "bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia's reliable sources/perennial sources list" because it describes "MSNBC and CNN as 'generally reliable' sources, while listing Fox News as a 'generally unreliable' source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a 'blacklisted' and 'deprecated' source that Wikipedia's editors have determined 'promotes disinformation.'"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/ted-cruz-picks-a-fight-with-wikipedia-accusing-platform-of-left-wing-bias/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
108 replies
Ted Cruz thinks we should stop attacking pedophiles
Anything he does from now on is an attempt to distract us from that uncharacteristically candid statement
It's kind of funny how when your goal becomes to present factual information, there aren't many especially right-leaning sources. I wonder why that might be.
Can you think of why that might be the case, Ted?
I'm not sure ol' Rafael is capable of thought.
He is very capable of thought. He's an intelligent and well educated man who puts on a persona to further his own agenda. He is lacking empathy and morals, not thought.
I have yet to see any evidence of that. Everything I've heard from him has always been utterly moronic.
He probably took on the mantra of the SubGenius, but for dark purposes: "Act like a dumbshit, and they'll treat you like an equal".
I've seen Ted Cruz eat his own boogers.
He graduated from Princeton, and Harvard Law School. He is not a stupid person, it's mostly an act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Education
That said, conservatism seems to literally damage the brain, so he's probably gotten dumber over the years.
Little Raffy doesn't even deserve a cute irreverent nickname. Just another asshole trying to ruin the world
Also, these ding-a-lings keep confusing rather mid corporate news outlets as "liberal". Also, it's awfully interesting how butthurt the right is about SPLC, I have to say. They've been howling about that one for years. Gosh, I wonder what it is about SPLC that makes them so angry?
Reminds me of how they used to howl about ACORN until they had that little weasel O'Keefe make up a bunch of bullshit about it. Of course, a lot of these little shits have been whining about Wikipedia ever since its inception, since people constantly use it as a way to refute their LIES.
This is how you move the Overton window.
Ted isn't confusing anything here, he knows exactly what he is doing.
Jesus Christ, things were so quaint back then...
Sorry, yeah, I should have pointed out that the con base are the ones getting confused. The likes of Ted definitely know what they are doing when it comes to this lie.
It's arguably true in the traditional sense of "liberal". But these are the same Republicans who also use "liberal" and "Marxist" interchangeably, so that's probably not their point.
Left wing bias = says objectively true things about me I don’t like.
This is literally where we are right now.
My MAGA parents told me that they consume news "from both sides". When pressed to name a single source that they consider on the left, they could not. They didn't even try to say "CNN" or some shit, they simply could not come up with a single source.
So thankfully, they recognized their irrationality, and are no longer MAGA.
Lol jk 🥲
Both sides = Fox News vs Newsmax
You're forgetting the center: OAN.
Reality tends to have a strong left wing bias indeed.
Maybe they can host it outside the U.S til they sort out their reality issues
Already is, and it's intentionally internationally distributed for this exact reason in as well as some benefits to accessibility.
I mean, there's definitely an Americanized liberal valence to Wikipedia editing, primarily because the website is administered and edited by a bunch of libertarian-leaning liberals. But that's not the only source of editing. In fact, the primary problem with Wikipedia is that there are so many blind spots the admins can't track and such a huge incentive to fudge history in your own favor. The idea that the website is objective is fucking horseshit and instances of manipulation are well-documented.
...
Cruz's problem is that he's wildly unpopular. Consequently, the site tends to be bombarded by folks posting "Ted Cruz fucked it again" tags to his biography far faster than his own team can polish his hagiography and take down negative news bits. If he was less high profile or more popular, he wouldn't have this problem.
You mean that Fox News that argued it’s an entertainment show that no reasonable person would take seriously?
Is this the same Fox News that had to pay out a $800,000,000 settlement for lying about the 2020 election?
Did they ever pay that? Where’d the money end up?
Yep, they paid Dominion Voting Systems who sued them for libel and then during discovery exposed that they had intentionally misled their audience. They paid various others for lying too but Dominion was the most consequential.
The point of him making this dumb comparison is to quietly sell the idea to The Stupids that Heritage, Fox and other propaganda places deserve equal consideration as reality.
They need to make their own site. Magapedia? Wokepedia? Pedopedia?
https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page if you wish to suffer brain rot
Oh, wow. That’s pretty wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia
It gets really wild when you see what motivated its creation. These people are unbelievably stupid snowflakes.
OMG! Using CE for dates!?
/clutches pearls
Also, apparently they don't teach very goodly at the Eagle Forum University. This guy seemingly has not even had a 101-level course in ethics...
This is the kind of argumentation you'll hear from complete dumbasses in junior high: "You guyz don't even believe in my god, so coming from a framework that bears no relevancy outside of accepting that framework on faith, I declare that you have no morals!"
Er, okay then.
It’s been said before but if all that is keeping you from raping and pillaging is fear of an invisible sky daddy then that says far more about you than anybody else.
It's worse than that, it's always such a self-report: "the only thing stopping me from doing evil is fear of punishment, so everybody else must be inherently terrible shitheads too!"
I was not aware of this.
The shit apple doesn't fall far from the shit tree, Rand.
I’ve never diddled a child. I’m such a terrible person!!!
/s
Wikipedia tries so hard to keep all articles factual and free of value judgements, while Conservapedia strives to jam partisan value judgements into every single sentence. Even their article on the Titanic is mainly there to whine about liberals. And conservatives are too stupid to understand the difference.
The Ted Cruz entry isn't very flattering.
Came here to say this. Brought to you by the son of that witch Phyllis Schlafly.
I think Elon Misk was going to make grokpedia by using ai to redo Wikipedia.
He would just get angry when it condemned Hitler.
If reality is left of you, maybe your position is far too right?
No it's obviously reality that's to blame!
Reality has a left wing bias
Fox News, the one that successfully argued in court they they were for entertainment purposes only and not actual news? That Fox News?
Here's an opinion piece about this, in case anyone is curious: https://niemanreports.org/fox-dominion-lawsuit/
"Wahhhh! They don't let us lie to you and treat us as reliable sources!"
I can't stand these scum...
Reality has a liberal bias
I recently looked into this on another forum where someone shared some articles supposedly proving bias. One article was itself highly biased to the right, so not particularly credible.
The other article, from an organization that ranked the bias of news sources, was very neutral and objective, took accusations of bias seriously, went into detail, and removed the "unbiased" classification from Wikipedia, but didn't conclude any provable bias, leaving it unranked. The best example of bias they had was the fact that articles on socialism and communism didn't list Soviet atrocities, but those atrocities have their own pages and are also mentioned on pages of the countries involved, so that was not a great example.
All these accusations are just the result of a massive right-wing campaign against facts and reality-based reporting. Everything that doesn't follow their propaganda is biased, according to them.
The Wikipedia page for Capitalism also doesn’t have any atrocities in my quick check; the “criticism” section is fairly short and tame. Somehow though I’m sure this doesn’t bother conservatives.
And to act like communism can only exist in a soviet context is just ridiculous. Like you said, the atrocities are very real and have their own pages because they’re not really so directly connected to communism. We shouldn’t lump every nasty thing the US has done into the capitalism page, either.
God, I just wish for once conservatives would have a thought that was even vaguely consistent across their worldview but in the end all we get is record-breaking hypocrisy and twisted feelings over any kind of sense.
That's what you get when you build your whole worldview and political platform on feelings instead of provable facts.
What is what you get? Complete control over what was previously considered the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet?
This is really what it comes down to.
You mean Rafael Cruz, who uses the chosen first name of Ted?
That's a mighty deportable first name. Would be a shame if people reported him to ice until they managed to find someone so ignorant they try to arrest him.
Do not treat this as just a tantrum. It's the right's playbook of moving the overton window to the right by taking extreme positions and invoking the golden mean fallacy. It certainly has worked on MSM.
Ooh that’s a new one for me.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argument-to-Moderation
Its been less effective on independent media and journalists. But its also just a rhetorical ploy. The real rightward shift in mass media towards conservative bias has come with mass consolidation of media ownership over the last 40 years.
Where as we once had a plethora of different regionalized perspectives and local coverage pools, now we're dealing with national syndication of conservative opinion pieces, police-blotter local news (incentivized by far-right broadcast managers), and wave after wave of native advertising used to turn news media into a more profitable revenue stream.
I would say the worst thing about modern American local news isn't even the naked reactionary Op-Eds and crime stories. It is the daily drum-beat piece about the lottery - who is winning, how much the pot is worth, where you can buy tickets, how many people are excited to participate... Fucking horrible. Since I gave up terrestrial TV, these ads stick out like a pus-spewing boil on the face of every single broadcast news feed.
@MicroWave
"Reality has a known liberal bias."
Stephen Colbert
Not false. Reality is proven to have a left-wing bias.
Attacking Wikipedia can not be normalized, we must protect it.
How long has Wikipedia been around? Looks like since 2001. I think their stupid attacks go back that far. I'm sure they'd love to use the battering ram of a compliant moron like Taco + the force of government to shut them down, though.
Just like they are attacking universities, law firms, science, the media, comedy....
There are mirrors
The organization that runs it, Wikimedia Foundation, needs to be protected though. That's based in the USA and has 363 employees. Hosting the content isn't the hard part.
Yes I agree with you but... Mirrors ensure that others can lick up the ball somewhere else
Wikimedia is awesome though
Upvoting for the typo.
Maybe they should move to Sweden or something.
Why are we still taking these right wing fascist morons seriously?
Because they have a fuckload of power right now? Now, it’s really nore that we should take the problem seriously and the people should be dragged through the streets, so if that’s what you’re getting at then hell yea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein_client_list
Apparently things like truth and reality are left wing now. Good luck with that, psychotic ultra right wingers.
Repeat after me, Die Mad About It. The sooner the better.
Ted Cruz picks a fight with mirror, accusing it of falsely making him look like Grandpa Munster grew a beard.
Now I can't unsee this
Is there a way to just download a straight copy of Wikipedia?
Def not asking because I expect every possible thing to go awry and we end up with Big Brother’s version of wiki
https://kiwix.org/en/applications/
Kiwix is an offline browser for wikis.
There's a library they have as well. I have a snapshot of Wikipedia from 2024 before the fascists took over. Also grabbed a couple others.
I think it was like 120GB for all of Wikipedia with pictures.
Excellent work. Share, copy, mail clusters of sd drives to all corners of the earth.
Neat. I will be maybe be dedicating a TB of storage to this for no particular reason
Glad I could help. Enjoy!
There is an official torrent that's about 25 GB compressed: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia
Thanks for the share!
I know Wikipedia is localized for many languages; I’ve never heard of a Straight Wikipedia though.
Yes you can download the whole database for a backup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
This seems like the perfect usecase for torrents. Is there an official torrent?
Edit: Nvm, found it.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia
About 25GB compressed
These people are such little babies. The whole reason Conservapedia exists is because they had a meltdown over using CE and BCE for dates. You know, as is the standard. But little whiny conservatives need to have their little book club centered at all times.
Sounds like the modern equivalent of burning books to me.
Any publisher of truth exhibits strong anti-fascist bias. That's because fascism is inherently anti-truth
I love it when this comes up in internet arguments. The mob often agrees with an individual's statement that Wikipedia is bad, and then when asked for an example it's always 100% something absolutely insane. The logical conclusion is that we're all wrong in different ways, but some people simply refuse to accept it and argue with the encyclopedia.
Now seems like a good time to do a backup.
For local use: https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/
If you have a server: https://blog.stefan-koch.name/2024/11/14/self-hosting-wikipedia
(Kiwix-serve is what you're looking for)
Unfortunately I can't vouch for either of these instructions as I followed instructions from a now defunct privacy podcast.
“Systemic issues are real when they affect the conservative agenda, and DEI is good when it requires including conservative propaganda.” Got it.
Reality does not have a right-wing bias. Reality does not have a left-wing bias. But when the right has festered into such an anti-scientific culture as to be at war with truth and reality itself to the point at putting us all at an accelerated risk of a new dark age - then reality is maybe just a little more biased in favor of literally everyone else.
To fascists like Cruz, "left wing bias" means "they are reporting unbiased data instead of compliantly rewriting everything to align with our centralized propaganda machine."
Unfortunately, the truth often has a left-leaning bias. If right-wingers aren't ok with that, they need to demand better from their sources.
I continue to think its extremely insensitive to call him Ted. He doesn't believe in preferred names. Use his real name Rafael Edward Cruz. Yes its /s but I'm serious. Call that POS Rafael.
Whatever his preferred name is, I think we can all agree that he is 100% human.
https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
Sorry Ted, no one will ever forget how Trump made your suck his cock after he insulted your wife.
"Dear sir or madam. I hope the day finds you well. I'm writing to let you know:
Thank you for your attention to this matter."
Raffy buddy we keep trying to Tell you reality has a left leaning bias. Maybe you'd hear it if you were ever in the states when your constituents are trying to talk to you.
Snowflakes that can't deal with their own emotions. You can't rewrite reality by edict. Go back in time if you want to fix yourself. You can't undo the harm you've caused to all of us. Best thing to do is to stop causing harm.
wikipedia just tells the truth it just happens that the truth has a left-wing bias
They relay objective information, so yes of course they do
Donated.
I think most of the world is considered left wing compared to the US.
Hell, even our "extreme right" would be more left leaning than the US left.
So yeah, any website that has international contributors, will be "left wing" from the perspective of the US.
It must not be protecting pedofiles hard enough
To quote "Stephen Colbert" (the character) at one of the George W. Bush White House Correspondants Dinners:
Interesting, is it not, that .ml also started beefing with Wikipedia exactly as this becomes a thing for conservatives.
What a chode