Russia Poisons Wikipedia

Heidi Siegmund CudaApr 30, 202646327Share***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.*** As AI chatbots continue to advance, Russia is infecting them with Kremlin-manipulated content tailored to influence the global internet, distorting the public’s understanding of facts and ability to make well-informed decisions.—Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia, Atlantic Council Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review. I am still unsettled. The page was stripped of reality, and in its place was a sanitized fairytale where Putin is good and the book — a brutal and damning historic account of Soviet abuses — is subtly and not so subtly undermined from every direction. Once I got over the shock of what I had just read — it was like being forced into an alternate reality — I began investigating Russia’s relationship to Wikipedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Russian state has been steadily distorting truth, exploiting the platform’s crowd-sourcing architecture to influence public knowledge. In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled Identifying Sock Puppets on Wikipedia, its authors used a ‘semantic clustering’ approach to focus on the “English-language Wikipedia entry for the Russo-Ukrainian war, and 48 other pages about Ukraine that link directly to it.” Malign activity has targeted a number of information environments, including every major social media platform: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, standalone websites and many others. This paper, however, is dedicated to possible platform manipulation on a venue that tends to be much less researched than mainstream social media: Wikipedia. This report presents work that set out to create, trial and evaluate a method to try to detect covert and organised manipulation of Wikipedia at scale. As I quickly learned, multiple reports have explored “organized manipulation” on Wikipedia’s entries on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Between September and December 2023, the French defense agency Vigilance and Protection Service against Foreign Digital Interference (VIGINUM) analyzed “information portals” disseminating pro-Russian content and targeting several western countries, including France. In the VIGINUM report, PORTAL KOMBAT: A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network, researchers investigated a network of 193 sites that initially covered news from “Russian and Ukrainian localities.” According to the research, the coverage changed the day after Russia invaded Ukraine and began to target occupied Ukrainian territories and western countries supporting Ukraine and its population. The sites in this network produce “no original content but massively relay publications from sources that are primarily three types: social media accounts of Russian or pro-Russian actors, Russian news agencies, and official websites of local institutions or actors.” “The main objective seems to be to cover the Russo-Ukrainian conflict by presenting positively ‘the special military operation’ and denigrating Ukraine and its leaders. Very ideologically oriented, this content repeatedly presents inaccurate or misleading narratives. As for the portal targeting France, pravda-fr[.]com, it directly contributes to polarize the Francophone digital public debate.” VIGINUM caught an insertion of the site pravda-fr[.]com being used as a source for a Wikipedia article about a “geopolitical situation” in the Red Sea. In a footnote, they wrote: “The Wikipedia article titled ‘Operation Guardian of Prosperity’ created on December 22, 2023, was edited the next day by user ‘@ Lataupefr,’ who inserted two articles from pravda-fr[.]com with sources being Russian-pro Telegram channels ‘@ BrainlessChanel’ and ‘@ kompromatmedia.’” See modifications: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Opération_Gardien_de_la_prospérité&diff=prev&oldid=210810683 The precise selection of these pro-Russian sources…proves there’s a real targeting effort to disseminate the strategic narratives… Given its technical characteristics, the processes implemented and the pursued purpose, this network constitutes foreign digital interference.—VIGINUM Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important. The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet. This week, we learned JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene promoted a fake story by the Russian disinformation network — Storm-1516 — which is linked to the GRU and believed to employ workers from the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg operation that attacked American minds to help install Donald Trump in 2016 and whose output was promoted by members of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which I recap in this series: PLEASE SHARE: 2016 ELECTION ATTACK SERIES: The Greatest Crime In American History — Parts 1 - 5 Heidi Siegmund Cuda·July 16, 2024Read full storyThe

Russia Poisons Wikipedia

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