On Citations Needed, the official podcast of Hexbear, they often say that emphasis is the atomic unit of propaganda. It's not that facts that run counter to the propaganda narrative are never covered; it's that they're de-emphasized while facts that support the propaganda narrative are centered.
A point that's just as important but less discussed is the level of evidence that's required to support or counter the propaganda narrative. We've all seen this in action on reddit: if you want to say that China isn't a genocidal neo-fascist hellhole or that the U.S. may have done some bad things abroad, anything less than an effortpost with dozens of links will meet a cold reception, and you'll absolutely get called out if one of those links is anything but an academic source or a mainstream imperial paper in the vein of the Washington Post or New York Times. But if you want to say China Bad, or that our sanctions on Venezuela are good? Oh boy, you can just toss that opinion out there and watch the upboats roll in.
Exactly. I looked at the page history for a bit and it's the perfect example of this. Someone removed all the unsourced claims for being, well, unsourced, and the next revision brought them all back, still unsourced. At another time, someone replaced all the unsourced numbers with "unknown", which was also changed back. Would they have done this if the article was about something else? I doubt it.
“common sense” is when you don’t need sources
If I could make every American listen to only one Citations Needed episode it would be one of the common sense ones.
This article is incomplete, you can help by
:sicko-yes:
adding missing items with reliable sources
:sicko-wistful:
On and off wikipedia editor for a decade, recommend adding some disputed tags around it. Wikipedia only leans this way because most of the editors lean liberal/right and they have a lot of spare time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Accuracy_dispute#Disputed_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disputed_section
Wikipedia be like:
Although *insert communist leader here* improved his nation’s infrastructure[1], healthcare[2], and living standards[3], he is widely criticized for eating babies whole[citation needed]
widely criticized[by who?] for eating babies whole[citation needed]
then delete in a week when no citations appear, lol
It stays up, look at :hoxha-turt:
During his 40-year-rule, he focused on rebuilding the country, which was left in ruins after World War II, building Albania's first railway line, raising the adult literacy rate from 5% to 98%, wiping out epidemics, electrifying the country and leading Albania towards becoming agriculturally self-sufficient.[3][4] He is criticised for a series of political repressions which included the establishment and use of forced labour camps, extrajudicial killings and executions that targeted and eliminated dissidents, a large number of which were carried out by the Sigurimi secret police.[citation needed]
citation on that's been dated with sept 2020, and no one's gone ahead and cited it. go ahead and delete it comrade :sankara-salute:
seems like it's back
"During his 40-year rule, he focused on rebuilding the country, which was left in ruins after World War II, building Albania's first railway line, raising the adult literacy rate from 5% to more than 90%, wiping out epidemics, electrifying the country and leading Albania towards becoming agriculturally self-sufficient. He also outlawed religion, traveling abroad, and private property, shutting down all churches and mosques in Albania. Under his regime, thousands of perceived dissidents were executed, and tens of thousands more were imprisoned or sent to forced labor camps.[3][4]"
[3] being what seems to be an unsourced documentary i can only find as a youtube reupload, and [4] being the fucking encyclopedia brittania entry on him, and if there are any sources cited in that i'm missing them.
lmao and they use the name St. Petersburg instead of Leningrad even though it became Leningrad in 1924. Clearly written by some reactionary chump.
Also the propaganda model for the human rights industrial complex. Which is what makes it so hard to squash these lies, because all they have to do is tick the cycle over one more time to get "fresh" sources while we have to constantly dig through hundreds of citations (or find them when they just straight up don't give them) and draw the connections.
As that process continues, the connections get longer, the game of telephone distorts the story to even worse claims, and tracing the connections makes you look like the Pepe Sylvia meme and people write you off as the crazy one.
Looks like our favorite podcast is pretty popular with Wikipedia types as well...
And the Kazakh famine isn't one of them? How accurate is that row?
It might have been removed. The row for the Holodomor also says it was deliberately caused by Stalin as a genocide. There used to be a citation needed tag for that one but the next revision removed it because it's "well known historical fact" :agony:
Damn, they've really embraced "a lot of people are saying this" as actual history
The :hoxha-turt: page is a classic:
During his 40-year-rule, he focused on rebuilding the country, which was left in ruins after World War II, building Albania's first railway line, raising the adult literacy rate from 5% to 98%, wiping out epidemics, electrifying the country and leading Albania towards becoming agriculturally self-sufficient.[3][4] He is criticised for a series of political repressions which included the establishment and use of forced labour camps, extrajudicial killings and executions that targeted and eliminated dissidents, a large number of which were carried out by the Sigurimi secret police.[citation needed]
edit: got rid of it lmao
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN1642896020070816
