Following a series of Pirate Wires investigations into Wikipedia that showed coordinated edit swarming to promote pro-Hamas talking points, minimize documented human rights crimes by Islamic Republic Party officials, and launder left-wing propaganda to the top of Google search results, interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia (and permanent Trump pick for the position) Ed Martin threatened Wikipedia's tax-exempt status in a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation yesterday.

The letter accused Wikipedia of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public" and of allowing articles that are "biased, unreliable, or sourced by entities who wish to do harm to the United States" to be prioritized by Google at the top of search results, which "will only amplify propaganda to a larger American audience."

First reported by @TheFP today. 🧵


Last October, we published an investigation that showed how pro-Hamas editors hijacked the Israel-Palestine narrative with coordinated edit swarming on Wikipedia.

Six weeks after October 7, for example, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas.

The group also appeared to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials.”

Martin's letter accuses Wikipedia of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public." [...]

"Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key historical events and... other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.”

Martin asks in the letter: “What steps has the Foundation taken to exclude foreign influence operations from making targeted edits to categories of content in order to reshape or rewrite history?"

And: "What foreign influence operations have been detected, and what did the Foundation do to reverse their influence and prevent it from continuing?”

a san francisco voter guide for people who aren’t insane

San Francisco should be the greatest city in the world, and that’s the goal. But before we get to all the fun shit — new tunnels and trains up your ass, rooftop hydroponic gardens of genetically-modified flora, every building in the city zoned to seven stories (provided it is beautiful (we all know what is, and what is not, beautiful)), 24-hour clubbing in the foggy neon “midnight district,” promotions and raises for whoever is managing the city parks (you guys are doing a great job actually, thank you), and a colossal “Justice” statue on Alcatraz Island to match New York City’s Lady Liberty — we need to claw our way back to base-level human civilization.

Namely: crime should be illegal, emergency shelter should be built for the homeless, that emergency shelter should be prioritized over free one-bedroom apartments for drug addicts who just moved to the city, NGOs grifting city dollars in the name of improving a social problem they invariably make worse should be starved of funding, public schools should be safe and clean, public transportation should be solvent, and the budget should be balanced. Things, in other words, should just be normal.

At various points we have termed this philosophy of government “duh,” “yeah no shit,” and “what if things just worked?” Over time, the philosophy has become more popular, and today adherents of this radical perspective on local government functioning in a manner that is not, technically speaking, terroristic in nature… are legion. This is a voter guide for you — people who aren’t insane. Accept no substitutions.

Basic breakdown of the guide looks like this: first, we provide a cheat sheet with every answer, one after the other, for easy cribbing in your polling booth. Then, below, a bit more context if you’re curious about our thinking. This guide was put together by the Pirate Wires editorial team, with special thanks to guest star @sathaxe.

Now, let’s get down to business. SAN FRANCISCO

Board of Education:

Ann Hsu
Supriya Ray
John Jersin
[No fourth endorsement ]

These are the only three we’re confident don’t totally suck. Would leave that fourth slot blank.

Community College Board:

[No endorsements]

Sorry, we tried. But all of these people kind of suck.
Leaving this one blank.

BART Board, District 7:

Victor Flores

BART Board, District 9:

[No endorsement]

Joe Sangirardi seems like a nice guy, but he only seems to be running in order to market a 2026 ballot measure for more BART funding. That isn’t a plan to fix BART. No.

Mayor:

First choice: Mark Farrell
Second choice: London Breed
Third choice: Daniel Lurie

See selected notes for details.

City Attorney:

David Chiu

District Attorney:

Brooke Jenkins

Sheriff:

Paul Miyamoto

Treasurer:

No Contest

Board of Supervisors, District 1:

Marjan Philhour

Board of Supervisors, District 3:

First choice: Matthew Susk
Second choice: Danny Sauter

See selected notes for details.

Board of Supervisors, District 5:

First choice: Autumn Hope Looijen
Second choice: Scotty Jacobs
Third choice?: None. Eat shit, Bilal. We’d rather have a fat communist in office.

See selected notes for details.

Board of Supervisors, District 7:

First choice: Stephen Martin-Pinto
Second choice: Matt Boschetto

See selected notes for details.

Board of Supervisors, District 9:

Trevor Chandler

Board of Supervisors, District 11:

Michael Lai

Prop A: No
Prop B: No
Prop C: No
Prop D: Yes
Prop E: No
Prop F: Yes
Prop G: No
Prop H: Yes
Prop I: Yes
Prop J: Yes
Prop K: No
Prop L: No
Prop M: No
Prop N: No
Prop O: No

Mostly Peaceful Aztec Empire
after a video game trailer featuring an aztec warrior goes viral, posters bravely stand up against human sacrifice — and the knee-jerk defense of a uniquely evil society

by @river_is_nice

Last week, the video game and entertainment website IGN… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… In the prevailing cultural narrative, instilled in Americans from childhood, Europeans are bloodthirsty murderers in an Edenic pre-Columbian paradise: Pocahontas villains disrupting the peaceful lives of buckskin-clad Indians frolicking through the forest, singing to raccoons,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Apple Vision Pro is Apple's new augmented reality computer system, Tim Cook just announced at Apple's WWDC23. Here's what it looks like. "You browse the system simply by looking... tap your fingers together to select, flick to scroll."

BASE REALITY: An Interview with Grimes
the dawn of ai: technocracy v. the artist class, grimes trains an AI clone, simulation theory, the optimistic moral imperative, abundance, and waking up the cosmic robot gods
—@micsolana

It was a cold and drizzling San Francisco morning… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… “That’s not their job though,” Grimes says. “That’s not their job. That is the job of the artist.”

It was a question we’d circle a few more times throughout the interview: why are the architects of artificial intelligence so terrible at explaining what artificial intelligence is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

USA Today wrote “Some experts argued roles like this should go to actors who naturally have this body type.” But nobody naturally weighs 600 pounds, as Brendan Fraser’s character does. @river_is_nice dives into the fat activist response to his Emmy win — piratewires.com/p/the-whale-do… Roxanne Gay on The Whale: "[The writer & director] considered fatness the ultimate human failure." But it's not controversial to view 600lb obesity as a tragic human failure to avoid at all costs. And Gay, like all fat activists, implies a double standard for obesity here.

Corporate cost-cutting, social media, and a weak justice system coalesced into the perfect 21st century cultural Molotov cocktail. Milwaukee’s Kia Boys lit the fuse, and an explosion of car thefts swept the nation. @NickAndrewRusso’s full-time PW debut — piratewires.com/p/kia-boy-stol… Some Kias & Hyundais, lacking basic safety features, are insanely easy to steal.

Kids in Milwaukee figured this out. They started stealing them and posting hot-wiring tutorials and joyriding POVs to TikTok.

Before long, “Kia Boys” had popped up in dozens of American cities.

We ran some of the most viral chatbot screenshots through 6 different AI text detectors. The results: some of the screenshots are hoaxes, or the tools don't work. Or it's a mix of both. piratewires.com/p/ai-text-dete… This GPT-3 screenshot, which has over 620k views, was unambiguously categorized by all but one detector as human-written. OpenAI's detector wouldn't analyze it because the text is too short. But some detectors categorized other screenshots tweeted in that same thread as from AI.