Trump Justice Department threatens Wikipedia’s nonprofit status to accuse “propaganda”
From vaccine efficacy to LGBT health issues and the ongoing war with higher education, scrubbing all the information about government websites, the Trump administration appears to have encountered the problem of free information that is inconsistent with its specific ideology. The war on knowledge seems to have expanded to Wikipedia. Earlier this week, Trump-appointed lawyers sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, accusing it of allowing publicity to spread and threatening its nonprofit status.
The letter was sent by Ed Martin, an attorney for the District of Columbia, and firstly a letter sent by the free media, a Wikipedia host organization that may be “engaging in a range of activities that may violate its obligations under Article 26, Section 501(c)(c)(c)(c)(c)(c)” that allow the organization to allow the organization to not apply taxes.
Martin accused Wikimedia of not reaching this state to maintain it because he claimed that Wikipedia “allows foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda” and “allows information manipulation on its platform, including rewriting key, historical events and historical events and historical events and historical events and historical events of current and former U.S. leaders, as well as other matters of interests and other matters. He also claimed that since the foundation’s board of directors is composed of “mainly foreign nationals,” it “subverts the interests of American taxpayers.”
To calm these so-called problems, which are more like thin threats to conform to the government’s preferred historical version, Martin demands documentation and answers to a range of questions, including safeguards for the organization, to prevent advocacy and process, to prevent foreign influence. The Wikimedia Foundation must respond to the investigation by May 15.
