News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Wikipedia Editors Downplay Controversies Surrounding Harvard President Claudine Gay

Wikipedia editors have been actively trying to minimize mention of plagiarism allegations raised against embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay. This has included removing mention of the allegations from the intro of her article and removing detailed descriptions of the alleged plagiarism. Some editors have also tried to minimize mention of Gay’s handling of campus antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks against Israel.

Wikipedia editors have also removed all mention of the campus antisemitism controversy from the online encyclopedia’s article on Harvard University itself.

In Congressional testimony last week about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the Hamas terror attacks against Israel and the subsequent military response by the Jewish state, Harvard President Claudine Gay failed to unequivocally state that calls for genocide against Jews would violate Harvard conduct policies. Gay had previously issued a statement shortly after the Hamas invasion where she expressed “heartbreak” over the resulting death and destruction, but failed to condemn Hamas or even the terrorism committed against Israeli citizens.

Wikipedia ‘Supreme Court’ Suspends Member for Breaking Site’s ‘Code of Silence’

Another incident used as the basis for the suspension, according to Beeblebrox, involved him confirming information the Committee possessed that an editor’s ban from all Wikipedia-affiliated sites was due to false suspicions the editor was involved with a news report criticizing the site. The report noted the editor was banned from the Italian Wikipedia by a NATO agency employee over a dispute about a NATO critic’s negatively-slanted encyclopedia article.

News of Beeblebrox’s suspension was posted to the Arbitration Committee’s noticeboard last month. In the post announcing the suspension, the Committee stated he had “repeatedly failed to [p]reserve in appropriate confidence the contents of private correspondence sent to the Committee and the Committee’s internal discussions and deliberations by making disclosures on off-wiki forums.” The mention of “off-wiki forums” refers to Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy, where Beeblebrox is a member (Disclosure: this author is also a member of the site). A private warning was previously issued in September 2021 by the Committee over his conduct in disputes outside the English Wikipedia, including Wikipediocracy.

Court Rules Amazon Doesn’t Have to Pay $270 Million Back Taxes Demanded by EU

Amazon won’t have to pay about 250 million euros ($273 million) in back taxes after European Union judges ruled in favor of the U.S. e-commerce giant Thursday, dealing a defeat to the 27-nation bloc in its efforts to tackle corporate tax avoidance.

The ruling by the EU’s top court is final, ending the long-running legal battle over tax arrangements between Amazon and Luxembourg’s government and marking a further setback for a crackdown by antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager.

The Court of Justice backed a 2021 decision by judges in a lower court who sided with Amazon, saying the European Commission, the EU´s executive branch, had not proved its case that Amazon received illegal state support.

“The Court of Justice confirms that the Commission has not established that the tax ruling given to Amazon by Luxembourg was a State aid that was incompatible with the internal market” of the EU, the court said in a press release.

Amazon welcomed the ruling, saying it confirms that the company “followed all applicable laws and received no special treatment.”

NewsGuard Demands News Orgs Conform to Government Narratives

NewsGuard, a for-profit company that rates news websites and works closely with government agencies and major corporate advertisers, demands news websites follow government narratives, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

While there is no official ban on talking about, for example, the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines, editors and journalists understand that writing about such issues can result in consequences, such as demonetization and shadow-banning, due to the Orwellian existence of a network of government agencies and groups claiming to combat so-called “misinformation” repressing online speech, according to independent journalist Lee Fang in the New York Post.

NewsGuard’s business model is based on being a so-called misinformation meter. It rates news websites on a scale of 0 to 100 on an array of factors, such as headline choice and whether the website publishes “false or egregiously misleading content.”

According to Fang, while this may appear to some as an objective public service, these ratings are a way to coerce conformity, as they give NewsGuard the power to smear an entire website as untrustworthy if it strays from the government narrative.

In one example, the libertarian-leaning British website, the Daily Sceptic, received a 74.5 rating from NewsGuard. The Daily Sceptic editor Toby Young reportedly reached out to NewsGuard in a series of emails over the last two years trying to improve the site’s rating, only to be downgraded further after adding postscripts to articles, rather than retracting the articles completely.

NewsGuard had taken issue with the Daily Sceptic’s criticism of lockdowns, in which the site called them “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful” and cited academic literature on the topic, Fang reported.