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The brutal murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25 has sparked a wave of protests across the United States.Thousands of people took the streets of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities, demonstrating against police repression and demanding justice for Floyd and the other victims of police brutality.Since the tragic incident became known, several communist and left political forces in the U.S. have strongly condemned the murder of George Floyd, expressing their solidarity and support to the protesters across the country. Below you can read some of the statements:

PARTY OF COMMUNISTS, USA (PCUSA)

The murder of George Floyd is an act of police terror and cowardice that demonstrates the total disregard for the human rights and dignity of the poor and working-class peoples. An unarmed and innocent African-American was slowly executed by peace officers who are entrusted and sworn to protect their fellow citizens. The Party of Communists USA strongly condemns the recent murder of George Floyd by white supremacist officers of the Minneapolis Police Department on Monday, May 25, 2020. What the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis have proven once again is that they protect the privileges, property, and the power structure of the monopoly capitalist class. NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE STRANGE FRUIT! A communist, Abel Meeropol wrote the poem in 1937 that became a song performed by Billie Holiday in 1939.

Things have gotten worse since William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson presented the WE CHARGE GENOCIDE!* petition to the United Nations in 1951. Nothing will change until we as a nation of people truthfully and openly question the mentality of profits over people in the United States. Monopoly capitalism never died in the Americas! It continually persists, exemplified by the events in Minneapolis, with its victims being the poor and working-class members of society!

Just as our brother George Floyd was asphyxiated, so too are the poor and working peoples of the United States. The Party of Communists USA demands:

STOP GENOCIDE!

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!

THE LIVES OF THE POOR AND WORKING-CLASS MATTER!

SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES!

* * *

COMMUNIST PARTY, USA (CPUSA)

The Communist Party USA joins with the people of Minneapolis in demanding the immediate arrest and prosecution of the cops responsible for the murder of George Floyd.

The horrifying eight-minute evidence, streamed around the world, is clear and undisguisable. It reveals that the murder of George Floyd was a public execution by the police. The refusal to immediately make arrests has understandably sparked rage in Minneapolis and around the country. Once again, I cant breathe has become the battle cry of millions. Make no mistake, the protests will continue until justice is done.

Minneapoliss rebellion is the fault not of the protestors but of the system of institutionalized racism and violence that allows such atrocities to occur in the first place. These racist murders are occurring over and over, alive and in living color, and most often without prosecutionits a wonder more rebellions havent occurred.

Donald Trumps irresponsible threat to shoot the looters is as contemptuous as it is predictable. We recall with disgust his threat to order troops to shoot immigrants on the U.S./Mexico border. Indeed, threats of violence are a regular part of his tool kit. In fact, he openly encourages police forces to manhandle those arrested. It is Trump who is the thug-in-chief.

Trumps use of racism as a central organizing tool will only end with his defeat in November. But the country cannot wait to address the epidemic of racist violence. Congress, state legislatures, city councils, labor leaders, clergy, and representatives of community organizations of every stripe across the country must address the crisis. The time is way past due for community control of the police. In the first place, neo-Nazi, KKK, and other neo-fascist elements must be driven out of police departments around the country. Investigate that! In addition, our country needs a radical reform of policing.

Compounding the routine violence against African Americans is the impact of COVID-19 on working-class communities of color in all aspects. They are the ones dying in inordinate proportions. They are the first to serve on the front lines and, like in any war, the first to die.

We call on our members and friends to join the protests for justice in every way possible and to make justice for George Floyd part of every demonstration going forward.

Our hearts, prayers, and solidarity go out to George Floyds family and to Floyd himself, who cried out for his deceased mother while a thug sat on his neck. We say, rise up and protest. We join with millions demanding justice now!

* * *

FREEDOM ROAD SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION (FRSO)

The people of Minneapolis have taken to the streets the past 72 hours, demanding the arrest of the killer cops who murdered 46-year-old African American George Floyd on Monday night, May 25. Eyewitness video was released Tuesday morning showing now former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd the ground, with Chauvins knee directly on the back of his neck the video shows Floyds last gasps for air. You can hear him telling the killer cop that he cant breathe and calling for his mother before you see his body going limp. Three other cops on the scene stand by, with two other cops actively helping to restrain Floyd on the ground, all ignoring the pleas of bystanders to let him breathe. Since then, tens of thousands in Minneapolis and have taken to the streets, demanding justice and retribution, which prompted the Minneapolis police to immediately terminate the four officers involved with Floyds murder and finally to charge and jail Chauvin May 29.

We cant forget that Twin Cities area police have been the target of recent high-profile struggles involving police murders, including the murder in 2015 of African American man Jamar Clark by two killer Minneapolis killer cops, which prompted a wave of protests; the murder of Philando Castile in the suburbs of Minneapolis on video, as well Justine Damond in 2017, which also prompted mass protests.

The question of killer cops targeting African Americans isnt just a story of Black people being more oppressed workers, its also the result of the system of national oppression, a system that chains down African Americans and subjects them to the most intense methods of brutality at the hands of the ruling class and its police force. From Minneapolis to Louisville, we see a disregard for Black life at the hands of the police, with the Minneapolis rebellion becoming a breaking point for the Black liberation movement, sparking nationwide protests.

As Martin Luther King Jr, once said, A riot is the language of the unheard.

We must continue the call to demand community control of the police as well as the indictment and convictions of all killer cops, especially those who murdered George Floyd. We must also, as what weve seen in Chicago with the LaQuan McDonald cover-up, fight to kick out government attorneys and prosecutors who refuse to prosecute killer cops and racist vigilantes, as they did initially in the case of Ahmaud Arberys lynching in Brunswick, Georgia.

On May 30, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is calling for a day of nationwide protests against the murderous policies of police departments nationwide as well as demand the mass release of inmates in prisons due to COVID-19. We unite with this call and know that the more people that hit the streets, the shakier the foundations of national oppression in this country becomes. Protests have already started taking place in cities like Memphis and Los Angeles, with many cities planning protests through the week leading into the weekend.

Our job is to organize, agitate and connect the struggle for Justice for George Floyd, Justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Justice for Breonna Taylor to our own local struggles for justice and community control of the police. We need to build organization on both a local and national levels to consolidate the power of the people into a fighting force against national oppression and the criminal injustice system.

The streets are on fire for action and our job is to continue to fan the flames.

Justice for George Floyd! Indict and convict the killer cops! Community control of the police now!

All power to the people!

* * *

WORKERS' WORLD

The corporate media call the May 27 protest in Minneapolis a riot. In a speech on March 14, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined that term, saying, A riot is the language of the unheard. Following his assassination less than a month later, Black people rose up in hundreds of cities in righteous protest. They were heard.

So was the Black population of Minneapolis. During the May 27 action, community members broke the windows and slashed the tires of a long line of police cars while arrogant cops drove them. The community, united in action, raised one powerful voice to say: We are all George Floyd meaning that any one of them could wind up a victim of a police lynching at any place or time.

The protests responded to the May 25 videotaped lynching of a Black man, George Floyd. Everyone who watched the video saw a white racist cop, Derek Chauvin, choke Floyd to death with his knee as he was begging for his mother and his life while three other cops, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng, did nothing to stop this atrocity.

The long unheard Black community in Minneapolis only needed a spark Floyds execution to arouse its collective anger built up during years of humiliating police occupation, harassment, beatings and arrests and rise up. Even the statistics justify their anger: Of those police shot in Minneapolis from late 2009 to May 2019, some 60 percent were from the Black community though they make up only 20 percent of the total population. (New York Times, May 28)

Righteous protesters broke the windows of the Third Precinct Headquarters where the four fired cops were once based. They picked up tear gas canisters the cops targeted at them and threw them back at the police. They burned or expropriated goods from AutoZone, Target and other businesses.

A class view of violence

Once the protests moved from peaceful on May 26 to direct action on May 27, the corporate media rushed to defend the capitalists sacred private property and labeled some protesters violent. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other officials called for calm.

This posturing repeats the standard attempt by capitalist politicians who seek to drive a wedge between the masses on the issue of nonviolence.

They focused on the same argument in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965; in Newark, N.J., and Detroit in 1967; in the hundreds of uprisings following Kings assassination in 1968; the Miami rebellion of 1980; the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992; and Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

In his 1992 pamphlet, A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion, Workers World Party chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of a few among the masses as against the orderly law-abiding many.

Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.

Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses seek freedom from oppression and exploitation can be obtained that way. But Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle as well as the struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.

There are two factors that these multigenerational events have in common: First, they were ignited by police terror, especially killings of Black people; and second, they were major rebellions, carried out by the oppressed and their allies against their oppression due to decades-long inhumane conditions caused by capitalism.

Rebellions scare the hell out of the billionaire ruling class that wants to keep hidden its super-exploitation of the workers and oppressed. But when rebellions do break out, the ruling class will unleash its state apparatus the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Guard and even the Army in an attempt to terrorize neo-colonized peoples in the Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.

When the masses rebel, they are not only rebelling against the state, but they are rebelling against an oppressive system that denies them the basic necessities of life jobs, housing, health care, education and the right to live free from all forms of oppression, etc. in order to fulfill the inherent profit drive of capitalism.

As Marcy emphasizes, any spontaneous or unorganized violence from the oppressed is self-defense against the organized armed force of the state. There is no equal sign between the two; they represent two distinct, antagonistic social classes.

From diverse ideological perspectives, what both King and Marcy stated connect to todays events in south Minneapolis

However any oppressed community sees fit to fight back against legal and extralegal terrorism be it the police or neofascists alongside mainly antiracist white youth, is justified. It should be supported and defended against the slanderous attacks and lies propagated by right-wing and even so-called liberal media and politicians, whose primary objective is to apologize for a rotten system living on borrowed time.

* * *

PARTY FOR SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION (PSL)

We salute the thousands of Minneapolis, Minnesota residents who came out in justified indignation to demand justice for George Floyd. Demonstrators of all backgrounds and ages took to the streets the day after Floyds killing and were met with violent police repression. Police in riot gear used mace, tear gas and bean bag guns to repress the righteous anger of the people of Minneapolis.

It was only four years ago that Minneapolis mourned Philando Castile, a Black man also shot to death by police. His killer, Jeronimo Yanez, was let off and found not guilty at trial. The police killing of Castile sparked protests around the country.

This latest incident of state-sanctioned racist terror comes on the heels of a string of police and vigilante killings that have taken place since the COVID-19 crisis began in the United States. Though in some parts of the country lockdowns and quarantine measures are in effect, the oppression of Black people still remains and has in fact surged in the wake of one of the largest public health crises in recent history.

A video capturing the killing of George Floyd was posted on Facebook and sparked widespread outrage and protest. In the video, Floyd is seen pinned to the ground by his neck, face pressed against the ground so hard that his nose bled, and is heard repeatedly gasping I cant breathe. While Floyd was on the ground, officer Derek Chauvin pushed his knee into the back of Floyds neck, choking him for several minutes. As multiple bystanders pleaded with the officers to get off of Floyds neck, he became unresponsive and was taken by ambulance to the Hennepin County Medical Center. He was later pronounced dead. George Floyds last words, I cant breathe are the exact same last words of Eric Garner, who was strangled to death by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014.

The officers claimed they were responding to a forgery in progress, a possible non-violent crime. The officers alleged that the unarmed Floyd was resisting arrest, however they later changed their story, asserting that he was suffering from medical distress. It is outrageous that police would use such brutal deadly tactics on a person in medical distress, let alone anyone.

We cannot depend on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which has begun to look into the killing, for justice. The FBI is a violent state institution that has been wielded as a weapon against the liberation movement of Black people in the United States. The FBI has never been fair and partial to the Black community. Real justice will be brought about when the people organize and fight for their own demands in the face of racist oppression by the U.S. capitalist state. The police will always fulfill their role of being shock troops for white supremacy and capitalism as long as it exists in this racist state.

In this absolutely critical period, we sharpen our resolve to build organizations capable of waging militant class struggle against the racist state and their ruling class. The ruling class and its government has only shown complete disregard for the lives of millions of working-class people during the COVID-19 crisis, especially Black people who are disproportionately victims of the virus. Amidst the deep crisis, the racist killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. and Sean Reed in Indianapolis, Ind., make it clear that the protests and fight back must continue and intensify. We affirm and support the right of Black people and all oppressed people to protest and defend themselves against racist terror.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation demands that the four officers involved in Floyds murder be prosecuted and convicted. We also demand the end of the repression of the demonstrators in Minneapolis demanding justice and accountability during a health and economic crisis.

Justice for George Floyd and all victims of racist police terror!

Excerpt from:
George Floyd's Murder: U.S. Communist and Left Parties in solidarity with the protesters - In Defense of Communism

by Peter Baehr

When I arrived in Hong Kong from Canada in August 2000, to take up a professorship in sociology, I was struck at once by the openness of the citys academic culture. Put crudely, yet accurately, there was no political correctness in Hong Kong, no ideological policing of minds. The streets might be polluted by smog, but on campus the air was bracing.

Today Hong Kong is menaced by a different force, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As the Party tightens its grip on the city, with new national security laws, what can Hong Kong universities do to impede the curbs on academic freedom for which Communist states are notorious?

Answering this question requires us to recall what academic freedom is; to clarify the nature of the organisation that will attack it; and to be realistic about the support Hong Kong academics can expect from their Western counterparts.

Academic freedom is not the liberty for professors to do or say anything they please. Academic freedom is a norm which states that university professors should be free to teach, research and write on academic matters unconstrained by political and other kinds of interference.

Political activism in the classroom is not an exercise of academic freedom; it is the mirror image of state propaganda. And state propaganda is a speciality of Communism.

All Communist parties govern in essentially the same way. They replicate the Party structure at the granular level across all sectors of state and society: legislative assemblies, the law courts, the civil service, trade unions, the media, schools and universities.

The Party controls its subjects through a combination of ideology, fear and material incentives. Loyalty is valued more highly by the regime than competence. Ideology is valued more highly than creativity. And, everywhere, the expression of thought, especially in writing, is closely monitored for dissent.

Because academic freedom is, in its modern form, a Western concept, it would be reassuring for Hong Kong professors to count on their Western counterparts for support against Communist censorship.

But is that likely? Only from some quarters. Across much of the Western world and in Australasia too the public use of reason, and the existence of open debate, are in full retreat, threatened by an alliance of non-academic administrators, student activists, and academics who demand unanimity on all important matters.

Speakers with unpopular views are disinvited from campus or no-platformed. Political tests are administered as in the University of California system to appraise a job applicants attitude to diversity. Complex questions in class are reduced to ideological formulae.

And Marxism remains robust among the professoriat, either as a default critique of capitalism or reconfigured, with contortions that would have astonished Marx himself, as identity politics. In short, the CCP has nothing to fear from an influential section of Western academics.

Outside this unworldly stratum, however, a more critical attitude to China is emerging. As the CCPs soft power evaporates in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, its brutality is becoming plainer to Western governments, or at least harder to ignore.

The US, Canada, Australia and Britain have variously protested at Chinas Covid obfuscations: its silencing of domestic whistleblowers, its manipulation of a credulous WHO directorate, its threats to cut off medicines, and its public lies, notably the claim that the West was the source of the coronavirus.

Western governments were powerless to stop the internment of a million Uighurs. These same governments are not helpless to call the CCP to account post-Covid and transform their political and economic relationships with it.

Where does all this leave the Hong Kong academy? Co-authors and co-researchers abroad are likely to support us in any way they can. So will external examiners and reviewers of research grant applications.

The Hong Kong Research Grants Council an advisory body has several foreign experts on its panels. Western governments are also paying attention to what is happening in the city.

But it is obvious that we in Hong Kong must rely chiefly on our own actions and on the tradition of independence and plurality of which we are the fortunate beneficiaries. To uphold this tradition, I am calling on:

People subject to terror cannot be blamed for keeping quiet and inwardly emigrating. That is not yet our condition. Hong Kong universities are still free to discuss unseasonable ideas and professors are still able to write opinion pieces such as this one.

But the window is closing. Acquiescence and opportunism are the great temptations now, the stilling of voices voluntarily in anticipation of their silencing.

Academics especially their professional associations administrators, and students in Hong Kong are advised, as a matter of urgency, to work together in the coming months to craft a Hong Kong Charter of Academic Freedom.

If nothing else, the breach of academic freedom by the CCP, together with a host of other liberties, will then be fully visible not just to Hong Kong people but to all of those among the international community who still care about the life of the mind.

Peter Baehr is a Research Professor in Social Theory at Lingnan University.

Visit link:
Hong Kong must now rely on its own efforts to protect academic freedom - Hong Kong Free Press

By Elisaios Vagenas*.

The recent successful tele-conference held by the Communist and Workers Parties that cooperate within the framework of the European Communist Initiative, in which 24 parties from many European countries participate, constituted a new form of exchanging opinions and coordination of their efforts.

It demonstrated that the CPs can successfully utilize various forms when under pandemic conditions, direct contact between members, invitations to congresses and conferences were impossible. The class struggle does not cease, which makes it vitally necessary for the CPs to exchange views, to clarify their positions, to coordinate their action and to pursue a revolutionary strategy. In none of this can we back down under pandemic conditions when a new global economic crisis of capitalism is building momentum. Of course, the CPs must adapt their style of work as International, regional , and bilateral meetings are not feasible with a physical presence.

The form of Joint Statements by the CPs

One tried and true form of cooperation and coordination among the CPs are the Joint Statements. The formulation of the texts of Joint Statements clarifies the assessments which each CP has decided upon, as well as the goals of struggle each party has set for the development of joint action.

This process remains important, despite the fact that many Communist and Workers Parties today are weak, either functioning under semi-illegal conditions or severe persecution or not having all of the means available that the KKE has today along with some other parties, to struggle for the common goals that are formulated.

In order for the international communist movement to emerge from the ideological-political and organizational crisis it has been in over recent decades, it is necessary to comprehensively strengthen it in every country and region, as well as to coordinate the joint struggle and to formulate a revolutionary strategy at the international level. The process of exchanging viewpoints and the related struggle around serious issues within the context of the preparation and publication of Joint Statements can contribute to the above direction.

The KKE and the recent Joint Statements

During the recent period of the Pandemic, the Party signed 5 Joint Statements of the Communist and Workers Parties, some of which were approved after an initiative of the KKE, while others on the initiative of other parties which were supported by our Party, which sought whenever necessary to contribute to improving their content. All of the statements were published in Rizospastis. These were:

Whatever glitters isnt gold

We could say that Lenins quote that before we can unite and in order that we may unite, we must first of all, draw firm and definite lines of demarcation (*) suits todays situation and the issues of the joint statements of the parties. The period of the pandemic turned out to be very dense in terms of initiatives taken for the publication of Joint Statements. In addition to the 5 listed above, other parties took related initiatives. This doesnt mean that all could be accepted and supported by our Party, in the name of a superficial unity of the international communist movement. Such a unity is not only unnecessary, but actually is detrimental to the communist movement as it doesnt clarify important issues.

The discussion of different viewpoints, agreement or disagreement, comradely disagreement over serious ideological-political issues of strategic importance is necessary and will continue over the next period. Through this process and the utilization of the experience derived from the class struggle, incentives will be provided for a more substantial mastering of the principles of our worldview and Marxist-Leninist methodology, the elaborations of the CPs will be enriched and this requires great perseverance.

Some parties who took initiatives for joint statements, outright rejected the contribution of other parties in formulating the texts they presented. Conversely, the KKE, as well as other parties that undertook the above initiatives and which were supported by our Party, asked for comments on the initial texts that were submitted. They gave great attention to the many proposals from other parties. They accepted substantial comments that improved the original content. Some parties did not allow such a process to take place for their own texts, while very problematic positions persisted within the texts, such as positions that vindicate the social democratic management of the capitalist system, attributing all of the problems to neo-liberal management.

Nor, could the KKE of course, agree to gratuitous and detrimental requests from parties who call upon the USA to comply with international law as the CP of Spain did, as if we arent dealing with the most powerful imperialist power on our planet, but with a young girl who strayed from the path and is awaiting the CPs to put her on the correct path of adherence to international law. That law that today legitimizes imperialist interventions and charges the imperialist body NATO to enforce it in different situations. Of course, it would be difficult to expect anything different from a party that has been immersed in the opportunist current of euro-communism for decades, a party that has abandoned revolutionary principles, who views the state and the law as being classless, that has slipped into the management of capitalism in its country.

There were also attempts for Joint Statements to be signed not only by Communist and Workers Parties, but also by other self-proclaimed left forces that appear, e.g. in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and against the designs of the USA, but who at the same time support similar plans, especially those of the imperialist EU.

There have also been efforts for CPs to co-sign texts not only with bourgeois left forces, but even with right-wing political forces. In the name of saving humanity, or the observance of international law. One such effort on the issue of the pandemic was made by the CP China. According to Andrei Klimov, senator and member of the Presidium of the center-right party United Russia, it was a joint initiative between the two governing parties of China and Russia, which was said to have been signed by more than 200 parties from all over the world. While the entire list has never been officially released, reports say that among those parties were many bourgeois parties from Asia, Africa, the Americas, policy makers that serve the interests of capital and that are responsible for the commodification of Healthcare, under-funding of the Public systems and so on. In any case, the specific joint statement makes no reference to capitalist barbarism, which is the cause of the situation that bears grave consequences for the peoples, nor of course does it refer to struggle aims for the development of joint action. How could it? Capitalist relations of production have prevailed in China for years, and Russia today is a product of counter-revolution and capitalist restoration

Among the parties that signed such a text were also some communist parties which of course, take responsibility for their choices. However, its very important that many CPs have taken a position on todays China and Russia which now play an important role in the global imperialist pyramid, as the intra-imperialist contradictions with the USA are intensifying.

All of the above show that not all of the efforts to issue Joint Statements had the necessary prerequisites to be considered a contribution to the strengthening of the international communist movement. As we often say in analogous situations, Not all that glitters is gold.

The importance of recording joint struggle goals.

Communists of different countries and regions may wage a struggle in every single country. There may be different approaches to issues of strategic importance. However, the collective effort has its own importance and the fact that in joint statements the same goal is put forward: the overthrow of capitalist barbarism, the construction of a new socialist-communist society. Therefore, every possible form of cooperation and coordination must be attempted under pandemic conditions, much more the tried and true form of Joint Statements that reflect common assessments and goals of struggle, that contribute to coordinated action at the international level towards the benefit of the working class, of the peoples.

(*) V.I. Lenin Collected Works, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Synchroni Epochi, Volumne 6, pg. 22.

Eliseos Vagenas is a member of the CC of the KKE andHead of the International Section of the CC of the KKE.

Excerpt from:
KKE: The joint action and coordination of the Communist Parties under pandemic conditions - In Defense of Communism

Photo illustration by Slate. Image via Wikipedia.

Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internets knowledge ecosystem.

In March, Facebook was filled with posts that claimed that 5G networks, not a novel coronavirus, were making people sick. Yet searching for those same posts today leads to an error message: Sorry, this content isnt available right now. Thats because Facebook and other social media companies have removed many conspiracy-type posts from their platforms, including the thoroughly debunked 5G connection. But some internet activists are concerned that this pandemic-related content is not only being removed but erased, leaving future researchers with a gap-filled historical record.

Enter Wikipedia. In April, 75 signatory organizations sent a letter asking social media companies and content-sharing platforms to preserve all data that they have blocked or removed during the COVID-19 pandemic and make it available for future research. The letters recipients included Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia. When Wikipedia editors discussed the letter among themselves in forums like Wikipedia Weekly, the most common reaction was, Dont we already do this?

Over the past few months, Wikipedias coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely praised for its breadth and relative trustworthiness. To date, the main English Wikipedia article about the pandemic has been viewed more than 67 million times, and COVID-19 articles exist in 175 languages. The 5,000 articles related to COVID-19 cover everything from Anthony Faucis peers across the world, to the resulting global economic crisis (e.g., German Wirtschaftskrise and its Arabic counterpart), to a somewhat circular Wikipedia article about Wikipedias own response to the pandemic.

But todays wealth of Wikipedia content will also be valuable to future parties. As scholar and Wikimedia program coordinator Liam Wyatt writes, the text in Wikipedias archive will be of interest to linguists, historians or sociologists of the year 4000. In an interview, Katherine Maher, chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told me, One of the things that historians will find valuable is the way Wikipedia documents the rate of acceleration of understanding the virus itself.

For example, a future historian looking back on Wikipedias coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic this year would likely review the relevant diffs. Every Wikipedia article, and every revision to it, is saved even if the edit is relatively minor or short-lived. The diff shows the difference between one version and another of a Wikipedia page, allowing anybody to see exactly what changed between two precisely time-stamped moments. The diffs for the Wikipedia article about the COVID-19 pandemic include this one on Jan. 7 noting the first suspicions that the virus had an animal source, and this one on Jan. 8 with the first use of novel coronavirus. More recently, this diff shows the first insertion of the word bleach on April 29, after comments from President Donald Trump. A historian could use Wikipedias diffs to construct a case about how knowledge about COVID-19 evolved throughout 2020.

Researchers in the future could also learn from debates among editors. Each Wikipedia article has a discussion page where editors can participate in conversations about building the encyclopedia. Throughout April and early May, Wikipedias volunteer editors engaged in a lengthy discussion about renaming the article from 20192020 coronavirus pandemic to its current name COVID-19 pandemic. Notice how the new name identifies the virus specifically and drops the time range. What might this renaming signify to a future historian? Its impossible to know, of course, but one interpretation is that this was an early recognition that this pandemic could last until 2021 and beyond.

Future researchers will struggle more with historical data from social media companies. In March, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube removed videos from their platforms in which Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19. While this helped stop the spread of medical misinformation on those platforms, the deletion of the posts (and all associated comments and metadata) makes it more difficult for researchers to understand how the public engaged with that misleading content before it was taken down. In the past, these companies have not disclosed data on deleted posts, even after the fact, as they consider such information proprietary.

And its not just big tech companies that are purging the future historical record. Woody Harrelson and John Cusack posted support for the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory before voluntarily deleting those posts from Twitter and Instagram. And some journalists have begun routinely deleting their old tweets in order to reduce the risk of online harassment, a practice the Columbia Journalism Review characterized as erasing the first draft of history. But Wikipedia is less likely to be accused of this historical erasure since, with few exceptions, the software preserves the projects entire edit history.

Preservation is Wikipedias strong suit, but a long-term challenge for the project is the issue of systemic bias. Largely unintentional bias can be seen in the encyclopedias biographical articles (more than 80 percent male) and the disproportionate number of articles about sci-fi and technical topics (mirroring the preferences of the sites earliest contributors). We know that when original source material is biased, this limits the understanding of future researchers, who will ask questions millennia later like Where are all the women in ancient philosophy?

But todays Wikipedia supercontributors are keen to ensure that future historians will have access to a better archive. Comprehensive coverage was a recurring theme at this months virtual symposium on Wikipedia and COVID-19 organized by Wikimedia NYC, which featured prolific volunteers like Jason Moore. Moore has been documenting the pandemic in real time from many viewpoints, starting articles about the pandemics impacts in various U.S.states, the LGBTQ community, and discrete sectors like the cannabis industry. Another presenter at the symposium, Lane Rasberry of the University of Virginia, demonstrated how Wikidata can visually represent outbreaks of the virus on a world map. Because this language is machine-readable, it can be filtered out immediately from the central hub of Wikidata into the various language editions of Wikipedia. But Rasberry cautioned that this wiki outbreak data overrepresented North America and Europe and underrepresented places with fewer wiki editors. Thats just the way its working for now, he said.

Then again, future researchers may be able to account for some geographic distortions so long as the original record is still accessible. After the symposium, presenter Netha Hussain described an article she started on English-language Wikipedia called Misinformation related to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India. But if you search Wikipedia for that article today, you will not find it. Thats because other Wikipedia editors voted to delete the page on May 6. (The pro-delete group argued that it was improper for India to have a separate article for misinformation when other countries did not.) The article about misinformation in India is not completely lost to posterity, however, and unlike social media companies, Wikipedia is not claiming that it retains ownership of deleted content. These deleted articles can be viewed by Wikipedias volunteer administrators, and Hussain has also saved a copy of the deleted article about India and the editorial discussion about its deletion. Perhaps a future historian will someday comb through this discussion to better understand how editors responded to allegations of a corona jihad, a false narrative that has led to persecution of Indias Muslim minority.

Interestingly (at least to me!), these hypothetical future researchers would be using Wikipedia as a primary source. That may sound heretical, given that librarians and educators have been reminding us for nearly 20 years that Wikipedia is not a primary source, not a secondary source, but a tertiary source. Thats why Wikipedia has a handy help page to remind readers that you probably shouldnt be citing Wikipedia. But citing Wikipedia as a primary source makes sense in a future state where enough time has passed that todays Wikipedia revisions have become a historical artifact. Imagining this distant future presents an interesting thought exercise not only for Wikipedians but for other creators of online content: How might this digital media someday be interpreted as a revealing artifact from this period of distress and disease?

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Future Historians Will Rely on Wikipedias COVID-19 Coverage - Slate Magazine

It was just a decade ago when people talked about the website Wikipedia as, let's be blunt, a place for lies and nonsense. As Dunder Mifflin's Michael Scott noted in "The Office," "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So, you know you are getting the best possible information."

But, since then, the site has transformed. Today, Wikipedia is regularly the first place many of us check for information about everything. In fact, Wikipedia's pages on COVID-19 and the pandemic are viewed more than a million times a day, and edited almost every hour of the day.

And chances are good that when you visit the page, Dr. James Heilman may have just finished editing it.

"We don't have a vaccine, but we do know that this disease can be stopped," said Heilman, or "Doc James" as he is known. He is one of the hundred or so editors with WikiProject Medicine, which edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia.

His view? The only proven way to stop COVID-19 is through social distancing.

Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson asked Heilman, "Do you think that social distancing is working?"

"Yes, definitely. You know, we have a good understanding of the transmission of disease. You know, if everybody was to hold entirely still for four weeks, this disease would be eradicated," he replied.

In his other life, Heilman is an ER doctor at a small hospital in Canada. "I do not recommend people trust Wikipedia blindly," he said. "I think doing so would be silly. Yet, you know, people shouldn't trust other sources of information blindly, either."

Wikipedia runs solely on the good will of volunteers like Dr. Heilman. Some are your typical denizens of the internet. Others are academics and retirees, like Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight: "We, the editors of Wikipedia, are really like a learning machine," she said. "We collaborate. We have networks of people who work in various areas."

She wrote English Wikipedia's six millionth article last year.

"We've learned that what we did initially write articles that maybe didn't have any reference, or enough references that wasn't the best choice for an encyclopedic article," Stephenson-Goodknight said.

She said references and transparency are critical to Wikipedia's success.

Katherine Maher, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that runs Wikipedia), said, "You can check every edit. If something is wrong, you can go ahead and fix it. It relies on reliable sources."

Maher said that, in comparison to the news we get off of social media, Wikipedia almost always wins.

"It turns out there's a lot of challenges with social networks when it comes to information distribution, a lot of questions about whether they can be trusted, [and] who's monitoring for that," she said.

Maher said having your own private newsfeed can actually divide us, which is a problem Wikipedia doesn't have.

"There's just one front page of Wikipedia," she said. "It doesn't matter if you are in Iran or in Italy or in Japan or sitting here in New York City. You're all looking at the same information."

Still, even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages.

When Thompson started working on this story, he looked himself up on Wikipedia, and someone had edited his entry to describe him as "a Martian technology journalist."

So, how do you keep information accurate on Wikipedia? Wikipedia feels the answer is to recruit more, and more diverse, editors.

One way that Wikipedia has tried to expand its pool of editors is through "Edit-a-thons," like one held in Hong Kong in March, organized by Asia Art Archive and M+, of the West Kowloon Cultural District. "Wikipedia becomes more important because of people using the internet more and more widely," said one volunteer. "Different organizations with their own political aims and goals will try influencing Wikipedia."

Companies, governments and politicians all have tried to edit Wikipedia's entries for their own benefit. But Wikipedia editors are using computer programming to fight back.

Now every time someone makes an edit from the White House, a computer algorithm notes the edits, and sends out a tweet about them:

But, it's no secret why someone would want to influence Wikipedia.

"Knowledge is power," said Maher. "And that means that it is fundamentally disruptive, often to those in power. If you think about the history of what Wikipedia is, it's actually pretty radical. And I don't mean that in, like, a political sort of left/right way. I mean, that it is an inversion of power structures, this idea that information can and should be available to all."

But it's no secret why someone would want to influence Wikipedia, which explains why lowly Wikipedia, which was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales almost as a kind of experiment, has grown to be one of the most-visited websites on the planet. It also explains why it's banned in China.

In fact, one in three Americans now get their medical information from the web.

That's just fine with Dr. Heilman: "I don't mind having an educated patient," he said.

Thompson asked, "And do you think that having accurate information about COVID-19 on Wikipedia can save lives?"

"Well, you know, right now the only tool we have at our disposal to combat this virus is education around how it spreads," Heilman replied. "You know, this disease can be stopped by knowledge."

Maher said, "I genuinely think that Wikipedia runs on generosity and care. Somehow, this encyclopedia on the internet has given an outlet to millions of people to show that good."

Oh, and in case you were wondering, on March 30, an anonymous internet user based in Hillsboro, Oregon, using their cell phone, decided to make two changes to Wikipedia. One was a detail about baseball's opening day, and the other was about Thompson, who is no longera Martian technology journalist, but an American technology journalist.

So, thank you, anonymous internet user!

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Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Chad Cardin.

Correction: In the original posting of this report, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was referenced as Rosie Goodknight-Stephenson. We regret the error.

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The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information - CBS News