"National Endowment for Democracy"-affiliated sockpuppets create articles for CIA-backed Venezuelan "student leaders"

[Bbb23sucks]

https://english.news.cn/20220508/cef96d ... a44/c.html

After Hugo Chavez, the “anti-US fighter”, was elected president of Venezuela in 1999, NED accelerated its behind-the-scenes operations. It provided continuous funding to the Venezuelan opposition and invited people to “training courses” in the United States. Since 1999, NED has run activities via the USAID office in the US Embassy and the offices of its core recipient organizations in Venezuela. It stayed in touch with and funded activities of dozens of institutions and opposition parties and organizations in Venezuela in the name of “promoting democracy”, “resolving conflict” and “strengthening civil society”. NED’s spending on interference activities in Venezuela rose year by year. It was 257,800 US dollars in 1999, the largest in Latin American countries. In 2000, it soared to 877,400 US dollars. In 2002, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the US Department of State earmarked as much as 1 million US dollars to support NED programs in Venezuela. In 2019, NED programs in Venezuela totaled 2.66 million US dollars. Among them was an NED project that focused on advancing “political processes”, for “Strengthening Outreach, Communication and Organizational Capacity” with the funding of over 90,000 US dollars, to be used for providing training and support to local activists, to strengthen the communication capacity of democratic actors, to strengthen the nationwide “civil society” network, and to develop communications teams to disseminate across the country a message (of hope and support) for “democracy”.

In October 2005, Juan Guaidó and four other Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to attend NED-funded training for insurrection. After the training, Guaidó and others returned to Venezuela to promote extreme right-wing ideas, in an attempt to influence young Venezuelans, masterminding a series of violent street political activities. Later, Guaidó enrolled at a US university and, with the support of NED, has been active in relevant political groups in the United States. After Guaidó declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela, his Wikipedia page was created shortly afterwards and edited 37 times by NED-affiliated organizations, to support the propaganda for his “legitimacy”. In November 2021, Russia Today reported in an article that a string of recent US internal documents revealed how the United States meddled in the electoral process in Venezuela. Documents showed that US intelligence fronts weaponized social media to promote Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, and assist their election to parliament, thus laying the foundations for Washington’s appointment of Juan Guaido as the country’s leader.

The four core institutes of NED all engage in all kinds of activities in Venezuela. They have built close ties with opposition parties in the country and helped train existing or newly-established opposition parties on organization, management, publicity and other fronts. They have provided several funding packages to the largest opposition union in Venezuela and pushed it to stage anti-Chavez protests and demonstrations. When Nicolás Maduro was sworn in as President on 10 January 2019, the United States and some other countries refused to recognize his new term and instigated Juan Guaidó, then president of the National Assembly and opposition leader, to contend for leadership and openly challenge Maduro. Guaidó then declared himself interim president and demanded a new presidential election, plunging the country into unrest. The turmoil in Venezuela is a telling example of what “color revolutions” plotted by US-backed proxies would incur. NED’s many years of attempts to cultivate Venezuelan opposition elements clearly played a role. In March 2019, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said that funded by NED, many organizations conducted destablizing activities across the country and attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan government over the past 20 years.

Other interesting content besides Wikipedia too.

[ericbarbour]

https://english.news.cn/20220508/cef96d ... a44/c.html

Go ahead, take a wild guess what en-WP thinks of news.cn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency

Xinhua tailors its pro-Chinese government message to the nuances of each international audience.[3][4] The organization has faced criticism for spreading propaganda and disinformation and for criticizing people, groups, or movements critical of the Chinese government and its policies.[5][6][7]

[Bbb23sucks]

Go ahead, take a wild guess what en-WP thinks of news.cn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency

Xinhua tailors its pro-Chinese government message to the nuances of each international audience.[3][4] The organization has faced criticism for spreading propaganda and disinformation and for criticizing people, groups, or movements critical of the Chinese government and its policies.[5][6][7]

Interesting how only some state media outlets are "bad" and not others. I'm sure it has nothing to do with their views on the CIA. /s

[Philomath]

I've gotten into intense arguments about NED-funded "news" being put on Wikipedia. NED-funded outlets are used to justify putting smears in Wikivoice ("it's not my opinion, its what the sources say bro!")

There is a long history of the CIA-backed Venezuelan opposition being promoted on Wikipedia through the widespread use of NED-funded outlets like Coda Story (and others) and the deprecation of any source that provides a counter-narrative (Grayzone, Venezuelanalysis, and others). I'm quite aware of this, and could write a whole article about this one topic...maybe I should.

People use weasel language like "well, this outlet is funded by the NED, but not to the degree that it affects reliability". What? Shouldn't the fact that an outlet is funded by a government agency for explicitly propagandistic purposes disqualify it from being "generally reliable"? In a sane world, yes. Only a CIA asset or a useful idiot could take the positions taken on Wikipedia in regards to the NED and Venezuela. I think there are editors who fall into both camps, mostly the latter.

Something about Wikipedia seems to attract NPC drones/useful idiots. This merits further discussion to make sure that an alternative, like Justapedia, doesn't attract the crowd, at least not to the same proportion that Wikipedia does.

[ericbarbour]

Interesting how only some state media outlets are "bad" and not others.

One could say similar things about Al-Jazeera's WP coverage. It is unquestionably owned by the Qatar government and delivers the pro-government line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeer ... _criticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeer ... #Criticism

And meanwhile....it's still okey-dokey to use Al-Jazeera as a source. TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND TIMES.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... azeera.com

And News.cn, known mouthpiece of the Chinese government, appears 648 times as a "Wiki-acceptable source".

There is a long history of the CIA-backed Venezuelan opposition being promoted on Wikipedia through the widespread use of NED-funded outlets like Coda Story (and others) and the deprecation of any source that provides a counter-narrative (Grayzone, Venezuelanalysis, and others). I'm quite aware of this, and could write a whole article about this one topic...maybe I should.

Yes please. And don't forget to summarize the EXTREME HYPOCRISY Wikipedians practice when it comes to biased sources. List the ones I gave above, and mention that utterly stupid push by David Gerard and his fuckbuddies to remove all sources from the Daily Mail. And even THAT isn't very well run ... right now there are 279 links to the Daily Mail.

Summary: Wikipedia is erratic, and biased in erratic ways. You may quote me.

[Philomath]

I will write an article about this. The outlet "The Grayzone" wrote a detailed article some years ago about the shady characters involved in the deprecation of Grayzone and Venezuelanalysis. I'll use that, plus your insights, as a starting point.

Unfortunately, the editors at the Grayzone are hard to get in touch with. They're rather busy, especially since their GoFundMe account was recently frozen due to unspecified "concerning activity". In fact, after an extensive correspondence, I haven't heard from them at all since the asset freeze. Although I know they're interested in publishing Wikipedia criticism, I'm not going to send them anything until I get more consistent communication from them.

In other words, someone at GoFundMe Googled the Grayzone, clicked on Wikipedia, saw a bunch of NED-sponsored smears, and decided to freeze the Grayzone's GoFundMe assets. That should be seriously worrisome to anyone who cares about living in a free society, but I think the Wikipedia crowd gets off on this sort of thing - it makes them feel powerful, and they're way too stupid and incurious to notice the potential long-term consequences of this.