Manufacturing Consent with Wikipedia: Analyzing Citations

Intro

Let’s start with a bit of a roleplay: I’m an average American conservative.

On the nightly news, my favorite reporter with a permanently furrowed brow and lack of melanin mentions some terrifying human rights abuses in China. The CCP is at it again with their authoritarian, totalitarian, all the -ians I don’t like policy. Wanting to know more, I turn to Google and find a nice Wikipedia page titled “Uyghur Genocide” after Googling the phrase “China genocide”. It was the third result but Wikipedia is one of my favorite spots, like most Americans. Its a nonprofit dedicated to neutrality and accuracy, and I want to avoid MSM or any of the biased government reporting.

Another scenario, this time from a “blue no matter who” liberal:

I remember a few months back listening to NPR and hearing about very concerning human rights issues in China against a Muslim minority. Today CNN reported on the same thing for what feels like the hundredth time! I feel I need to be more informed on the evils of authoritarian communism, and even though it was Trump’s admin that called it a genocide, Biden seems to be in agreement, and has even signed a diplomatic boycott and put sanctions on the area. After Googling “China human rights uyghurs”, I found a nice Wikipedia page with a ton of info. I quickly do a search with CTRL-F, and it looks like there is only one “citation needed” and the page has over 400 sources. Now onto the reading…

Note: These were intended to be caricatures of average Americans, not exact scenarios. I think you can see how the stories flow in a fairly recognizable, even generous way. A fair portion of Americans wouldn’t end up doing any research at all, and rely on the media to inform them: a media owned on both sides of the aisle by the same corporations and interests.

As anti-imperialists and Marxist-Lenninists, many on the left routinely investigates new journalism, knowing that capitalists are the current purveyors of information and historically the state has utilized more than just bombs and guns to maintain power. Controlling the narrative around certain geopolitical issues allows Washington and others to plant the seeds of conflict in the average American mind. They do this early and often, so that when they take aggressive steps into conflict(s) in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, or “human rights”, it’ll feel almost organic and self-originating to the American mind. This quells anti-war sentiment among the populace and clouds the vision of even those purporting to be against empire. As the great author Michael Parenti said, responding to student complaints that the government “doesn’t care what we (the people) think”:

“That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. What they… the only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking.”

It’s not often we can find concrete, quantitative and at scale data on the US meddling with global narratives, but a user over at r/GenZedong compiled a list of all 486 citations on the Wikipedia page for “Uyghur Genocide”. Today I want to analyze this curated dataset, its implications and relative slant. Before I even begin, I think its important to point out which countries even recognize this supposed atrocity.

Manufacturing Consent: A Framework

In theory, the framework outlined above could work just as well for any particular agenda, but is highly effectively and extremely common place when it comes to instilling anti-communist point of view into a mass of people that would benefit from its existence. When it comes to military conflict, these same filters can be used to push for war, even when it will only hurt the group being propagandized.

1. Ownership — this goes along well with Lenin’s first criteria for imperialism, that being concentration of production. With monopoly capitalism, media has coagulated into a massive network of interrelated organizations funded by similar interests, if not the same group of ruling class individuals. This allows an easy access point for mass media messaging, and the ruling class can begin to filter an idea down to the public, spinning it to fit the particular channel of dissemination. For example, a Fox News and CNN coverage of China and the Uyghurs are going to differ in absolute animosity, approach, verbiage, even tone: nonetheless the takeaway is distrust, fear, anger towards China. Its not necessary for the ruling class to achieve specifically a hate for communism — hate, apathy or a defeatist stance on alternative systems is plenty.
2. Funding and Advertising — advertising can be yanked by ruling class if it goes against their intended message. Making advertising income the primary source of revenue for media presents a conflict of interest, where networks are forced to choose between obedience and skepticism, and a narrow range of ideas are allowed to be debated. This is why the only networks and groups covering this issue and debunking lies around it are independent and as such, have a smaller reach and less funding for spreading the information among the populace.
3. Sourcing — The two primary sources for ‘human rights abuses’ in China are eye witness reports and Christian Fundamentalist Groups (Adrian Zenz, who I will return to later on). Eye witness reports are the least reliable form of evidence as far as the judicial system is concerned, but that’s not necessarily a problem for mass media outlets. They take maybes and turn them into yeses. They fill in the gaps in stories and even when witnesses family’s come out against the narrative a few months down the line, selectively choose not to follow up. The damage is done. That’s a big reason why the American public has largely outdated views on socialism, and solved problems such as debunking lies against the USSR and China, as well as the Economic Calculation Problem, are still firmly lodged in American psychology. There’s also an intense focus on “official” sources, necessarily ignoring fringe voices, regardless of their validity. And if you insist on official sources on a geopolitical topic, you are almost always being filtered through the state department.
4. “Flak” — Suppression of media going against the narrative, or relegation to independent news. This goes well in line with the advertising filter, since that can get yanked from under a network at any time. Ostracizing dissenters to small and non-influential corners of the internet allow the ruling class to control the direction of the majority opinion.
5. Common Enemy — anti-communism underpins it all, providing a simple target stripped of historical context. A common enemy gives media consumers a sense of synergy and satisfaction as they more or less organically make connections to previous coverage and build a mental strawman. As long as the ruling class is winning on the ideological front, change remains out of reach. Another famous Parenti quote comes to mind here:

“If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.” — Blackshirts and Reds

Geopolitical Context

43 nations called on Beijing to allow independent observers into Xinjiang in October 2021 (curiously, this invitation has been open since at least 2019), with another 62 countries banding together to declare the whole campaign misinformation. This is the third straight year this Human Rights Committee meeting has focused on this particular issue. One thing to keep in mind is the timing of this entire news cycle with China’s economic rise over the US as a dominant world power in terms of GDP. Surely this detail should be relevant to any conversation, particularly with America’s history of utilizing fearmongering over human rights to start and continue imperialist wars. Remember those WMDs in Iraq? Yeah, me neither.

As an additional nugget of context for this conversation, let’s take a two-fold approach to US policy as it pertains to Muslim groups across the world:

Globally the US has:

1. Carried out a 20 year war in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands. Sanctions on Afghanistan are currently fueling a multi-faceted humanitarian crisis.
2. Routinely bombed Syria under the pretense of fighting terrorism, most recently in a Biden-approved air strike in February 2021. The entire Syria-Iraq conflict is mired in Western imperialism, supplying arms, aid and troops in an effort to destabilize and keep these two countries from recovering, effectively keeping them as US puppet states in a bid against the East. Most recently it was discovered that the US bombed a dam explicitly marked as no-strike, putting thousands of lives at risk and killing several outright.
3. Currently supplying bipartisan weapons to a Saudi-coalition that are being used in the worst humanitarian crisis of our time in Yemen.
4. Remains close partners and recently gave Israel $3.8 billion in “aid” for their genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza
5. In 2017, Trump instilled a ban on immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, proving that white supremacy is rooted in the US metadata. In typical fashion, the US has created immigrants with its war campaigns and global struggle for hegemony that it refuses to take in.

If the above were not enough to convince you that the US doesn’t actually care about human rights, please go back and review the last 100 years of intervention in elections, state sponsored terrorism and US-propped dictatorships designed largely to keep socialism at bay and global capitalist markets open. It’s not even clear they are convinced by their own propaganda as it pertains to Xinjiang:

1. After a “diplomatic boycott” of the 2022 Winter Olympics, the US is still sending its athletes and at least 18 diplomats to China for the Games. Note: If it was so dangerous and repressive, why send citizens and officials? Maybe because the world might ask for proof of wrong doing the state doesn’t have?
2. The US is currently sanctioning and banning exports from the Xinjiang region, an act that will no doubt have negative effects on the very conditions of the people they loudly proclaim to care about.

There’s likely a whole lot more I could provide in the way of context, but then we’d never actually get to the data. As you’ll see, this topic has been revolving ads nauseam in the Western news cycle for years now, increasingly in the last three years.

Ideological Context

Underpinning all of the US and Western actions as a whole is a rising tide of anti-capitalist sentiment throughout the world. The era of neoliberalism has failed everywhere it has tried, even here in the US, where all the benefits of imperialism should be the most felt. In many ways, they are, and the American working class is elevated compared to the global south. Yet the majority of benefits are still siphoned up to the ruling class, with the reality of proletarians being one of extreme (relative) austerity.

With China rising steadily over the last 50 years, we’re beginning to wake to a new world: the US will no longer be number one. Although they were never number one for their own people, massive military might and imperial presence in every corner of the world, spread out over 800+ foreign bases have allowed the US to dictate the way of the world. “International” systems such as the IMF and World Bank, NATO and the UN have given the illusion that the world is just a natural capitalist, neoliberal zone. However, whenever alternative systems have been attempted, the imperialists step in to “restore order”. Primary examples include but are not limited to: alliance of 14 nations against the USSR, blockade of Cuba, bombing campaigns that have decimated Vietnam and the DPRK, countries that have received the full might of US militarism and economic oppression via sanctions.

Through all of this, China has continued to rise. Its Belt and Road Initiative has seen it substantially invest in the Global South, finally offering an alternative deal at the global table. Countries that previously had no choice but to accept the West’s terms have now turned to China for development prospects. Suddenly we are living in a multi-polar world. If you are the US (ruling class), that is a very bad thing.

Now, direct conflict in Russia (another rising power) or China does nothing to benefit the American working class, and ever since Vietnam, the US Military Industrial Complex hasn’t been able to take a straightforward path in getting consent for conflict. Coming off of the disastrous Afghanistan war that only benefitted defense contractors, the most popular method of gaining the public’s support for conflict over the past 30 years has been manufacturing, exaggerating, or causing humanitarian crisis, and playing the role of global police. From the WMDs debacle in Iraq, to the Taliban excuse in Afghanistan, to the fearmongering over nuclear weapons in the DPRK, America has an endless campaign of presumably just reasons for entering and continuing bloody wars, at the expense of American and foreign lives and oodles of taxpayer money. Even looking at the at-hand issue: this has largely been caused by American intervention in East Asia (aka the Middle East), leading to a serious spurt of radicalization that flooded into China. The US faced a similar blowback in 2001, and well…I think we’re all aware of how it was handled here. With this context in mind, let’s analyze the 486 sources cited on Wikipedia in regards to the latest human rights crisis the US is taking oversized interest in.

Source Analysis

Date Published

As you can see above, the data we have is very current. Now, the spread of this data doesn’t tell us too much. But it could mean one of a few things. Either, it lends credence to Wikipedia for being up to date and updating their sources regularly, or the last three years have seen a major push of this particular story in the news and the internet at large. Do what you will with that info, I’m not sure how much of a conclusion we can draw here.

Note: That final bar is 2022, so necessarily low at the moment. This isn’t going away soon, and the anti-China sentiment and coverage has reached a fever pitch since 2020, leading to a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US. Maybe demonizing an entire 1.4 billion people emboldens racists and bigots? A discussion for another article, I digress.

Next let’s look at some additional data we have on where the citations originated (country). This will give us an idea about who’s narrative is being focused on, and whose voice might be missing from the conversation.

Location of Origin of Citations

We can see above that the vast majority of the citations originate in the US, meaning they are from US headquartered firms and orgs, and subject to oversight and direct influence by the state department. Even absent of direct meddling, they are severely limited in knowledge, and only able to rely on English sources. Even looking at the citations that originated in China, we see a conspicuous bias. Only 2 mainland sources in the entire 486 sources (0.41%). The China sources receiving the most representation here are Hong Kong and Taiwan based, two areas rife with US state influence and their own bourgeoise elements. Following the US are predictable allies: UK, Canada and Australia. Just these four make up 390 citations, or 80%. Why are anti-Western sources missing from this page in any real sense?

Next, let’s look at the actual publishers both in the US and Worldwide. A few hours of work by our fearless internet comrade have given us some insight into where the citations originate. These publishers could certainly use an external audit, but it is a simple (if arduous) task typically to follow sources back to their place of origin.

In just the US, here are the top 20:

Number of Citations per Publisher (Top 20 US Only)

Well, first things first: Wikipedia, three citations from Buzzfeed? Not that the rest of these don’t contain some form of lack of credibility (looking at you Radio Free Asia aka the CIA), but this one is worth a chuckle. The top 3 here might come as a shock if you are an American liberal, but come at no surprise to me. CNN and the NYT are notoriously good at stripping “human rights” stories of their global and historical context and positioning the US as a nebulous morally gray (or more typically good) entity. The global picture isn’t too different, with some comparably liberal outlets in the UK and elsewhere joining the clamor of voices.

Number of Citations per Publisher (Top 20 World)

Pronounced here is the Western bias. One thing we should know as Americans when it comes to potential conflicts is to be fairly skeptical. Not only that, but remember that war doesn’t benefit us in any way. It benefits capitalists. The last few things I’d like to spend some time looking at are the types of publications in the US (ie are these media sources? Thinktanks? Humanitarian orgs?) and any state funding that can be found.

Over the years 2019–2021, here is the breakdown of citations originating in the US, broken out by publication type:

This isn’t a hugely insightful visualization if you are not a Marxist. If you are, however, you’ll be fully aware that the “free press” is not exactly free. State oversight, monopoly dictatorships and parameterization of coverage is ever present in American media. The superstructure enforces and legitimizes the base. The entities and individuals that own the media outlets we consume have a vested interest in war via market speculation or holdings in defense contractors (historically profitable in war time). The state (Obama, Trump, Biden, it doesn’t matter much) is a line of defense between bourgeoise and proletarian interests. A good indicator of the government’s class alignment would be the increase in military and police budgets under Biden (a whole lot of this cash is going directly towards posturing and pushing conflict in China and Russia).

Known Vs Unknown Funding

For the citations our internet friend was able to trace back (only around 20% of total), around 17% were funded directly by the government. Others contain direct ties to Christian fundamentalist groups, and the infamous Adrian Zenz. I have my suspicion that if you went another layer deep on the 42 government funded citations, and even a portion of the 80% without a known association to any official source, Zenz would act as a root node for many accusations. His “reports”, full of erroneous data manipulation that harkens back to the Black Book of Communism, and self proclaimed mission of “saving China from communism” should be enough to discredit him. But as leftists, it’s typically our burden to counteract these narratives more directly. One way we can do that is to take a look at the material conditions of Uyghurs directly.

Contradictions on the Ground

Just this week, China reported a GDP growth of 7.7% in the Xinjiang region, a fact that flies in the face of these accusations. Even under a sanction regime by the ‘humanitarian concerned’ United States, the area continues to grow and conditions improve for the Muslims in the area. According to Statista, GDP growth has been a trend here for at least the last decade. This is due to China’s deliberate state planning in the area, focusing on providing industry, skills and education. Alright, well GDP isn’t everything admittedly, and often a bourgeoise metric.

Illiteracy in the region is currently around 2.66%, right below the national average of 3.3%, showing that China’s language investments and education have paid off. More and more individuals are opting for higher education as well: compared with 2010, the number of people with university education rose from 10,613 to 16,536 per 100,000 persons, and those with high school education grew from 11,669 to 13,208. This data does come from China’s most recent State Council Information Office of China report on Xinjiang. Some naysayers may point to this as a sign of inaccuracy, but what boggles the mind is how these same types defend the US’ baseless and uncorroborated claims about the region. If shifting the goalpost is all it takes, we are in a seriously depressing spot. Even so, there is still an open invite from China to visit! I suspect when the Olympic games occur next month, this narrative will all but fall apart. Keep your eyes peeled for a secondary or tertiary pivot down the line.

As I’ve alluded to, this is more accurately seen as an economic and ideological battleground, as China has given the world an example yet again about how state driven industry can put profit over people with their handling of the coronavirus. The USA doesn’t have much left to rely on except vague claims of authoritarianism and lack of “freedoms” (positive and negative freedoms seem to be missing from this conversation). As Americans, it’d be good to brush up on comparisons of China’s democracy to our own, keeping a keen eye on who benefits from one vs the other. One thing Americans could really benefit a lot from is understanding alternative governance instead of simply taking our politicians at their buzz(words).

Final Thoughts

An article published in 2007 showed that the CIA and FBI had a history of editing Wikipedia.

An article in 2013 showed that PR firms have been exhibiting influence on Wikipedia entries.

In 2014, Wikipedia banned IP accounts originating from Congress, and created a CongressEdits bot on twitter that tweeted every time an edit was made by a Congress IP. Twitter suspended that bot in 2018, showing that private interests are entwined in this narrative building and collusion. It’d be extremely naïve to think that the CIA and FBI didn’t take that slap on the wrist and batten the hatches down, finding new ways to get edits through. This could very well be by funding private PR firms, but I’m unaware of any research here.

One thing we can say for sure is that war has not and will not benefit the American, or any working class. It’s incredible that the US can preach ‘self-determination’ when it comes to fascist holdouts in China such as Taiwan, but will do anything but allow socialist countries to self-determine. The disparate and fringe American left needs to come together over an expansive anti-war, anti-imperialist movement, to show solidarity with the people of Russia, China and every other country the Empire sets its sights on in 2022 and beyond.

Dataset and code can be found here: https://github.com/mlsm76/wiki_source_investigation