If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days. Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.
Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland“, about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”
Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader“, about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”
Here’s one from the day before titled “Here’s how Sweden is preparing for an information war ahead of its general election“, about how the Swedish Security Service and Civil Contingencies Agency are “gearing up their efforts to prevent disinformation during the election campaigns.”
This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.
Which is, to put it mildly, really weird. Normally when the establishment cooks up a new Official Bad Guy they spell out exactly why we’re meant to be afraid of them. Marijuana will give us reefer madness and ruin our communities. Terrorists will come to where we live and kill us because they hate our freedom. Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction which can be used to perpetrate another 9/11. Kim Jong Un might nuke Hawaii any second now.
With this new “Russian hybrid warfare” scare, we’re not getting any of that. This notion that Russians are scheming to give westerners the wrong kinds of political opinions is presented as though having those political opinions is an inherent, intrinsic threat all on its own. The closest they typically ever get to explaining to us what makes “Russian disinformation” so threatening is that it makes us “lose trust in our institutions,” as though distrusting the CIA or the US State Department is somehow harmful and not the most logical position anyone could possibly have toward historically untrustworthy institutions. Beyond that we’re never given a specific explanation as to why this “Russian disinformation” thing is so dangerous that we need our governments to rescue us from it.
Two weeks after the Atlantic Council explained to us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, Facebook announces a new partnership with the Atlantic Council to make sure we're getting the right kinds of information.https://t.co/aXwHvxdREXhttps://t.co/3CkVtvBs0s pic.twitter.com/sEz52VjNTe
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 17, 2018
The reason we are not given a straight answer as to why we’re meant to want our institutions fighting an information war on our behalf (instead of allowing us to sort out fact from fiction on our own like adults) is because the answer is ugly.
As we discussed last time, the only real power in this world is the ability to control the dominant narrative about what’s going on. The only reason government works the way it works, money operates the way it operates, and authority rests where it rests is because everyone has agreed to pretend that that’s how things are. (or should be.) In actuality, government, money and authority are all man-made conceptual constructs and the collective can choose to change them whenever it wants. The only reason this hasn’t happened in our deeply dysfunctional society yet is because the plutocrats who rule us have been successful in controlling the narrative.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. This has always been the case. In many societies throughout history a guy who made alliances with the biggest, baddest group of armed thugs could take control of the narrative by killing people until the dominant narrative was switched to “That guy is our leader now; whatever he says goes.” In modern western society, the real leaders are less obvious, and the narrative is controlled by propaganda.
Propaganda is what keeps Americans accepting things like the fake two-party system, growing wealth inequality, medicine money being spent on bombs to be dropped on strangers in stupid immoral wars, and a government which simultaneously creates steadily increasing secrecy privileges for itself and steadily decreasing privacy rights for its citizenry. It’s also what keeps people accepting that a dollar is worth what it’s worth, that personal property works the way it works, that the people on Capitol Hill write the rules, and that you need to behave a certain way around a police officer or he can legally kill you.
And therein lies the answer to the question. You are not being protected from “disinformation” by a compassionate government who is deeply troubled to see you believing erroneous beliefs, you are being herded back toward the official narrative by a power establishment which understands that losing control of the narrative means losing power. It has nothing to do with Russia, and it has nothing to do with truth. It’s about power, and the unexpected trouble that existing power structures are having dealing with the public’s newfound ability to network and share information about what is going on in the world.
Please, please, please do read this - the tip of a very sinister iceberg. I intend to write about it myself including the incredibly defensive, rude reaction of Jimmy Wales and @wikimediauk when "Philip Cross" is raised, and the bigging up of MSM figures. https://t.co/stR3wa8TQZ
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 17, 2018
Until recently I haven’t been closely following the controversy between Wikipedia and popular anti-imperialist activists like John Pilger, George Galloway, Craig Murray, Neil Clark, Media Lens, Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson. Wikipedia has always been biased in favor of mainstream CNN/CIA narratives, but until recently I hadn’t seen much evidence that this was due to anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project and most people believe establishment-friendly narratives. That all changed when I read this article by Craig Murray, which is primarily what I’m interested in directing people’s attention to here.
The article, and this one which prompted it by Five Filters, are definitely worth reading in their entirety, because their contents are jaw-dropping. In short there is an account which has been making edits to Wikipedia entries for many years called Philip Cross. In the last five years this account’s operator has not taken a single day off–no weekends, holidays, nothing–and according to their time log they work extremely long hours adhering to a very strict, clockwork schedule of edits throughout the day as an ostensibly unpaid volunteer.
This is bizarre enough, but the fact that this account is undeniably focusing with malicious intent on anti-imperialist activists who question establishment narratives and the fact that its behavior is being aggressively defended by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales means that there’s some serious fuckery afoot.
“Philip Cross”, whoever or whatever that is, is absolutely head-over-heels for depraved Blairite war whore Oliver Kamm, whom Cross mentioned as a voice of authority no fewer than twelve times in an entry about the media analysis duo known collectively as Media Lens. Cross harbors a special hatred for British politician and broadcaster George Galloway, who opposed the Iraq invasion as aggressively as Oliver Kamm cheered for it, and on whose Wikipedia entry Cross has made an astonishing 1,800 edits.
Updated: The Philip Cross Affair - UPDATE "Philip Cross" has not had one single day off from editing Wikipedia in almost five years. "He" has edited every single day from 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018. Including five Christmas Days. That's 1,721 https://t.co/z5NRExlLon
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 19, 2018
Despite the overwhelming evidence of constant malicious editing, as well as outright admissions of bias by the Twitter account linked to Philip Cross, Jimmy Wales has been extremely and conspicuously defensive of the account’s legitimacy while ignoring evidence provided to him.
“Or, just maybe, you’re wrong,” Wales said to a Twitter user inquiring about the controversy the other day. “Show me the diffs or any evidence of any kind. The whole claim appears so far to be completely ludicrous.”
“Riiiiight,” said the totally not-triggered Wales in another response. “You are really very very far from the facts of reality here. You might start with even one tiny shred of some kind of evidence, rather than just making up allegations out of thin air. But you won’t because… trolling.”
“You clearly have very very little idea how it works,” Wales tweeted in another response. “If your worldview is shaped by idiotic conspiracy sites, you will have a hard time grasping reality.”
As outlined in the articles by Murray and Five Filters, the evidence is there in abundance. Five Filters lays out “diffs” (editing changes) in black and white showing clear bias by the Philip Cross account, a very slanted perspective is clearly and undeniably documented, and yet Wales denies and aggressively ridicules any suggestion that something shady could be afoot. This likely means that Wales is in on whatever game the Philip Cross account is playing. Which means the entire site is likely involved in some sort of psyop by a party which stands to benefit from keeping the dominant narrative slanted in a pro-establishment direction.
A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that Wikipedia was getting some 18 billion page views per month. Billion with a ‘b’. Youtube recently announced that it’s going to be showing text from Wikipedia articles on videos about conspiracy theories to help “curb fake news”. Plainly the site is extremely important in the battle for control of the narrative about what’s going on in the world. Plainly its leadership fights on one side of that battle, which happens to be the side that favors western oligarchs and intelligence agencies.
How many other “Philip Cross”-like accounts are there on Wikipedia? Has the site always functioned an establishment psyop designed to manipulate public perception of existing power structures, or did that start later? I don’t know. Right now all I know is that an agenda very beneficial to the intelligence agencies, war profiteers and plutocrats of the western empire is clearly and undeniably being advanced on the site, and its founder is telling us it’s nothing. He is lying. Watch him closely.
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Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Appendix
Given the fact that pages can disappear without trace these days, below we have reproduced the contents of fivefilters.org’s expose of the entity known as “Philip Cross” (we don’t know if it is human, and if so, one or many, or if it is a robot, controlled by some specialists, all working to advance the western plutocratic narrative while cancelling and neutralising counter-narratives, we have reproduced that page below. Click on the orange button to examine it. Better still, copy it, download it, print it.
Time to ditch Wikipedia? A look at a Wikipedia editor’s long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
A Wikipedia editor called Philip Cross (Andrew Philip Cross and later “Julian” on Twitter) has a long record of editing the entries of many anti-war figures on the site to include mostly critical commentary while removing positive information contributed by others. At time of writing he is number 308 in the list of Wikipedians by number of edits.
Wikipedia entries very often appear first in search results, and so for many will be the first and only port of call when researching something. People unaware of the political nature of the editing that goes on on the site, in this case supposedly by a single, dedicated editor, are being seriously misled.
As an active editor for almost 15 years, Cross is very familiar with some of the more arcane Wikipedia rules and guidelines (along with their obscure acronyms) and uses them to justify removing information he dislikes in favour of his own inclusions. Often in a very subtle manner and over a long period of time. Anyone familiar with the work of the people he targets will recognise how one-sided and distorted those entries become.
Cross is, however, much nicer to the entries of people he likes. Former hedge-fund manager and Iraq war supporter Oliver Kamm, and right-wing author Melanie Phillips, both columnists for The Times, are two examples.
On Twitter, where Cross is more provocative and antagonistic, he doesn’t hide the fact that he has long-running feuds with many of his targets on Wikipedia.
After George Galloway, Media Lens is his second most edited article on the site. Cross is responsible for almost 80% of all content on the Media Lens entry.
Cross calls his Wikipedia targets ‘goons’. The list includes anti-war politician George Galloway former MP Matthew Gordon-Banks, historian, human rights activist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, investigative journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed, Edinburgh University professor Tim Hayward, Sheffield University professor Piers Robinson, and media analysis group Media Lens.
And he’s happy to openly taunt his Wikipedia targets on Twitter:
How this behaviour doesn’t fall foul of Wikipedia’s rules, we don’t know. Especially as his efforts, in addition to misleading the public, have serious consequences for the people targeted.
Cross’ activities are now finally getting some attention thanks to more of his targets speaking out on Twitter. The story has now also been picked up by RT and the Sunday Herald.
Ron McKay writes in the Sunday Herald:
Within the cyber cloisters of academe Wikiwars are raging, with one Edinburgh professor in particular catching the flak. Tim Hayward is one of the group of academics (his colleague Paul McKeigue is another) who set up the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media – or if you prefer the Times description, Apologists for Assad. The group’s questioning over whether it could be definitively concluded that the Syrian regime was responsible for the Ghouta chemical attack last month (they have also queried the Novichok attack of the Skripals) is apparently what provoked their pillorying in the Thunderer.
Within hours Hayward’s Wikipedia had been strafed and apparently favourable references removed. Former ambassador Craig Murray is another who claims to have come under “obsessive attack” with his page subject to 107 detrimental changes over three days. The journalist Neil Clark has a similar story about amendments and alterations.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that there are common threads here. All of those are – (select your own description, anti-war, assiduous, useful idiots?) – prominent campaigners on social media and in the mainstream media vigorously questioning our foreign policy. All have also clashed with Oliver Kamm, a former hedge-fund manager and now Times leader writer and columnist.
The RT piece opens with:
A mystery online figure called Philip Cross is targeting anti-war and non-mainstream UK figures by prolifically editing their Wikipedia pages – to the point that George Galloway is offering a reward to see him unmasked.
Active on Wikipedia since 2004, Philip Cross has been editing wiki entries for nearly 15 years. Recently, trouble has been brewing online, with Cross accused of paying special attention to a cluster of Wikipedia accounts, editing them or deleting chunks of information.
Pundits like Galloway, academic Tim Hayward, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, and ex-UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray have fallen in the crosshairs of the editorial mystery man (or perhaps woman) who goes by the name of Philip Cross – and many of them are growing frustrated with the lack of action from Wikipedia to prevent malicious editing.
See also this Sputnik interview with George Galloway. Galloway’s Wikipedia entry is Cross’ most edited page on the site with 1,796 edits.
So far none of this has resulted in any action from Wikipedia, only dismissals from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder.
Wikipedia diffs
Considering Cross’ quite open hostility towards the people whose pages he edits on Wikipedia, it should already be apparent that he should not be editing those pages at all. Those demanding diffs (exact changes made in an edit) are really missing the bigger picture here.
But let’s take a look at just a few of Cross’ recent edits. His edit history goes back many years, so this will only be a tiny sample. We encourage those targeted by Cross to send links to edits made to their pages so we can try to highlight them here. Each of the images here shows, on the left, a section of a Wikipedia entry before Cross’ edit, and to its right, what Cross changes it to.
Cross doesn’t like Sheffield University professor Piers Robinson.
So, he edits his Wikipedia entry and removes the fact that Robinson has written for the The Guardian…
…and throws in an unsourced claim about journalist Eva Bartlett (someone else he doesn’t like) and then tries to make a tenuous, defamatory connection between Robinson and another one of his targets (journalist Vanessa Beeley).
Cross likes Iraq war supporter, former hedge-fund manager and Times columnist Oliver Kamm.
So he removes completely the fact that there’s an upcoming court case brought against Kamm by journalist Neil Clark for harassment and defamation:
Oliver Kamm is notable when examining Cross’ edits, because, although Kamm himself is not a very significant figure, he appears to be one of Cross’ favourite people.
Craig Murray observed what happened to his Wikipedia entry when he criticised Kamm:
On 7 February I published an article calling out Kamm for publishing a blatant and deliberate lie about me. The very next day, 8 February, my Wikipedia page came under obsessive attack from somebody called Philip Cross who made an astonishing 107 changes over the course of the next three days. Many were very minor, but the overall effect was undoubtedly derogatory. He even removed my photo on the extraordinary grounds that it was “not typical” of me.
Media Lens also make an important point on Twitter:
The word ‘Kamm’ appears in the @Wikipedia entry for Media Lens twelve times. ‘Media Lens’ appears in Oliver Kamm’s entry….zero times. Just one reason why @jimmy_wales‘s focus on ‘diffs’ as evidence of bad faith is misplaced.
Cross likes right-wing Times columnist Melanie Phillips.
So why should anyone have to learn about Phillips’ climate change denial? Cross removed the section wholesale.
Cross doesn’t like media analysis group Media Lens.
So he removes something nice former BBC editor Peter Barron wrote about them…
…and changes it to:
Peter Barron, the former editor of the BBC’s ”Newsnight” commented in November 2005 that although Cromwell and Edwards “are unfailingly polite”, he had received “hundreds of e-mails from sometimes less-than-polite hommes engages – they’re almost always men – most of whom don’t appear to have watched the programme” as a result of complaints instigated by Media Lens.
And then, as with many of his other targets, he adds in vacuous complaints from people who prefer to insult and smear rather than engage with substance:
Despite Cross’ hostility toward Media Lens and a self-confessed “long standing feud”, he is, remarkably, responsible for the majority (77.8%) of the content on the Media Lens Wikipedia entry:
Click the image to expand it (made with WhoColor).
Occasionally, it seems, Cross does get caught out. His recent effort to write the entry for Edinburgh University professor Tim Hayward resulted in another editor reverting the change with the note:
this is all completely overheated; if it’s all he is known for, we’re headed for BLP1E [Biographies of living persons#Subjects notable only for one event]; if it is to be included, it will be worded responsibly and added via consensus
Cross attempted again to get his edit in, and was rebuked again:
you’re not even trying via a talk-page discussion
Wikipedia usage
Cross is listed number 308 in the list of Wikipedians by number of edits. (We’re linking to an archived copy here because Cross requested his name be removed from the list after his edits started to get more attention on Twitter.)
He is very active on Wikipedia, as his time card shows.
As should be clear by now, this is not a project that Cross takes lightly. He devotes considerable time to it: many hours every day and with the same intensity on weekends as on weekdays.
We pulled in the dates from his user contributions page and found that Cross had not had a single day off from editing the site in almost 5 years! (Consecutive edit dates between 29 August 2013 and 14 May 2018.) You’d have more free time to spend on leisure activities pursuing a regular full-time job than Cross has editing Wikipedia.
Craig Murray writes in his piece The Philip Cross Affair:
The operation runs like clockwork, seven days a week, every waking hour, without significant variation. If Philip Cross genuinely is an individual, there is no denying he is morbidly obsessed. I am no psychiatrist, but to my entirely inexpert eyes this looks like the behaviour of a deranged psychotic with no regular social activities outside the home, no job (or an incredibly tolerant boss), living his life through a screen. I run what is arguably the most widely read single person political blog in the UK, and I do not spend nearly as much time on the internet as “Philip Cross”. My “timecard” would show where I watch football on Saturdays, go drinking on Fridays, go to the supermarket and for a walk or out with the family on Sundays, and generally relax much more and read books in the evenings. Cross does not have the patterns of activity of a normal and properly rounded human being.
Wikipedia sees no problem with all this
Wikipedia user KalHolmann tried to alert Wikipedia admins to some of these problems, but his request to prevent Cross from editing was quickly shut down with the following response:
Zero evidence of COI [Conflict of Interest]. Galloway has picked a fight with Cross, not the other way around.
This despite the fact that Cross has himself has admitted a “big conflict of interest” (although that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to edit these pages).
Neil Clark points out how absurd the Wikipedia response is:
‘Philip Cross’ has edited @georgegalloway ‘s wikipedia page over 1800 times. George finally responds and offers a £1000 reward for Cross’s identification and it is he who is accused of ‘picking a fight’. This takes victim-blaming to a whole new level.
Don’t trust what you read on Wikipedia!
Please spread the word to anyone who’s unaware of the extent to which Wikipedia can be manipulated in this way.
Email a friend – Share on Facebook – Tweet about it
And if you’d like to see some action taken by Wikipedia, please tweet Jimmy Wales and let him know.
More information
- See stats on Cross’ Wikipedia activity
- See list of Philip Cross’ Wikipedia contributions
- Follow leftworks, Neil Clark, George Galloway, Media Lens, Tim Hayward, Piers Robinson, Craig Murray
Contact
If you’d like to get in touch about anything here, please email fivefilters@fivefilters.org or tweet us @fivefilters.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
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