Internet
Wikipedia Is Biased In Favor Of Liberals, Study Finds

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said to Unheard in 2021 that Wikipedia cannot be trusted any longer as a neutral source of information, saying it has become “propaganda.”
“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned,”
Wikipedia entries are more likely to paint public figures on the right in a negative light than the left, a Manhattan Institute study released Thursday found.
The study analyzed the sentiments of 1,628 words that were used in reference to political topics and found that Wikipedia generally uses more negative terms in reference to right-leaning public figures, and less when referencing left-leaning figures. The results would suggest that Wikipedia is contradicting its “neutral-point-of-view” policy, according to the study.
It also found that certain terms associated with right-wing politics are connected with emotions of anger and disgust more than left-wing politics. The same pattern can be seen with left-leaning ideas being more associated with joy related terms than right-leaning ideas.
The study warns that OpenAI language models share similarities with Wikipedia, underscoring the potential for bias in Wikipedia to affect other systems that rely on OpenAI technology.
“There is a degree of overlap in the prevailing sentiment associations of political terms in word embeddings derived from Wikipedia content and word embeddings from the OpenAI GPT series,” the study said. “This is not surprising, given that Wikipedia articles are likely a prominent part of OpenAI’s secret corpus of data used to train ChatGPT.”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT software has been shown to express left-leaning bias in its responses, according to a separate finding from the Manhattan Institute. Other researchers in 2022 have also found bias in its content filtering system.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger said to Unheard in 2021 that Wikipedia cannot be trusted any longer as a neutral source of information, saying it has become “propaganda.”
“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned,” Sanger said. “So, what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.”
Wikimedia Foundation, the parent 501(c)(3) that manages Wikipedia, created the Wikimedia Endowment as a “collective action fund” managed by the left-wring grantmaking titan Tides Foundation, which has donated millions of dollars to left-leaning causes since its inception. In 2019, the Wikimedia foundation hired Amanda Keton as general counsel, who was previously the CEO of Tides Advocacy, the 501(c)(4) arm of Tides that works on the “creation, financing, and consultation of various left-of-center organizations,” according to Influence Watch.
The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Business
The Digital Services Tax Q&A: “It was going to be complicated and messy”

A tax expert on the departed Digital Services Tax, and the fiscal and policy holes it leaves behind
It’s fun, and fair, arguing whether Mark Carney “caved” in suspending the application of Canada’s Digital Services Tax to revive broader negotiations with the Trump administration. But I figure there are other dimensions to this issue besides tactics. So I got in touch with Allison Christians, a tax law professor at McGill University and the founding director of the Canadian Centre for Tax Policy.
In our talk, Christians discusses the policy landscape that led to the introduction of the DST; the pressure that contributed to its demise; and the ways other countries are addressing a central contradiction of the modern policy landscape: without some kind of digital tax, countries risk having to impose costs on their own digital industry that the overwhelmingly US-based multinationals can avoid.
I spoke to Christians on Friday. Her remarks are edited for length and clarity.
Paul Wells: I noticed in your social media that you express inordinate fondness for tax law.
Allison Christians: You will not find a more passionate adherent to the tax cult than me. Yes, I do. I love tax law. Of course I do. How could you not? How could you not love tax law?
PW: What’s to love about tax law?
Christians: Well, tax law is how we create our country. That’s how we build our society. That’s how we create the communities that we want to live in and the lifestyle that we want to share with our neighbours. That’s how: with tax law.
PW: I guess the goal [of tax policy] is to generate the largest amount of revenue with the smallest amount of grief? And to send social signals while you’re at it. Is that right?
Christians: I don’t think so. Tax is not about raising maximum revenue. Tax is about deciding what society you’re trying to build and what portions of that society need to be made public, and what can be left to private interests which then need to profit. So we have decided in Canada, as a country, that basic minimum healthcare cannot be a for-profit enterprise. It has to be a public enterprise in order to make sure that it works for everybody to a certain basic level. So tax is about making those decisions: are we going to privatize everything and everyone pays for their own health care, security, roads, insurance, fire department etc. And if they can’t pay, then too bad? Or are we going to have a certain minimum, and that minimum is going to be provided in a public way that harmonizes across the communities that we have. And that’s what tax is about. It’s not about extracting revenue at all. It’s about creating revenue. It’s about creating a market. It’s about investing in a community. So I just object to the whole idea that tax is about extracting something from me, because what tax is doing is creating a market for me to be able to thrive. Not just me, but all of my neighbours, as well.
PW: Let’s jump forward to the events of the past couple weeks. Were you surprised when the Prime Minister suspended the Digital Services Tax?
Christians: I think “surprise” is probably too strong of a word, because nothing any political leader does to cope with the volatility of the United States would surprise me. We are dealing with a major threat, a threat that is threatening to annex us, to take our resources, to take our sovereignty, to take our communities and rip them apart and turn them into a different way of being. And that’s a serious threat. So nothing would surprise me in response to that. Disappointed, of course. But not disappointed in our Canadian response. More disappointed in the juggernaut that Trump has been allowed to become by his base, and that they’re pulling the rug out from under everyone that’s cooperated with the US agenda for decades, including us.
PW: What’s your best understanding of what the Digital Services Tax was designed to accomplish? And is it unusual as taxes go?
Christians: So to understand this, you really have to be a policy wonk, which isn’t much fun. So I’m gonna give you an example that might make it clear from the perspective of Canada. Why we might have a Digital Service Tax or might want something like it.
I want to preface this by saying that the Digital Service Tax is by no means the only way to do the underlying things we want to accomplish. Certainly other countries have been collecting DSTs and have been collecting billions of dollars, and US companies have had reserves for paying that Digital Service Tax. So we just left money on the table. But let me try to explain why we want to do the thing without getting too “tax nerdy” on you.
So I’m sure you can come up with the one Canadian company that’s streaming content on television or on digital devices.
PW: Crave?
Christians: Yeah, that’s the one. Crave is owned by Bell Media and is a Canadian company. And Crave pays taxes in Canada. Crave has to compete against Netflix, which does not have to pay tax in Canada. Netflix just simply doesn’t have to pay the same way that Crave does unless we force them to pay. Crave has to compete with US and foreign content streamers. We may get to a point where we can get Netflix to collect some sales tax on the GST, for example. But if Netflix itself stays out of Canada, physically, but it’s still getting all those customers that otherwise Crave would have access to, then Crave is at a structural disadvantage.
Now tell me which Canadian provider competes with Google.
PW: I can’t think of one.
Christians: Exactly. There isn’t one. How are we supposed to get a homegrown competitor when our competition simply does not pay taxes, and any one we would grow here in Canada has to pay tax here? So we have to understand the Digital Service Tax as simply our response to the fact that we normally do not tax a company unless they are physically located in Canada. But now we’ve got to go into this digital space and say: you’re still here, even if we can’t see you and talk to you, you’re still here. You’re doing something in our market. And that’s what the Digital Service Tax was trying to deal with.
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PW: Now, how are companies likely to respond to this Digital Services Tax? It seems to me the likeliest outcome would be that they would pass those costs on to their customers.
Christians: Yes, that is what companies have said they would do. Google talked about passing those costs on to the customers. And their customers obviously are advertisers. I want to point out that advertisers in Canada used to advertise in local newspapers and media. Now they advertise on Facebook, owned by an American-headquartered Company, Meta. Right now, they advertise on those foreign platforms, so we don’t have those advertising dollars here. Advertisers might have had to pay the Digital Service Tax if Google, or whoever, had passed it on to them. I think it’s fair to say, that Canadians advertising on those foreign platforms would have faced a gross-up to cover that tax.
PW: So, the net effect is that it just becomes more expensive for Canadian consumers. I’ve seen it argued that all this tax would have succeeded in doing is making Netflix more expensive.
Christians: Okay, that’s possible. I mean, that assumes the supply is totally elastic: you can increase the price of Netflix, and people will still pay it indefinitely. Right? So that’s the assumption in the short term. But the long-term assumption is that Crave becomes more competitive — because its competitors are paying the same tax that it is paying. The Crave subscription price may or may not respond, but if you put pressure on the foreign service providers in the same manner that’s on the Canadian providers, it might cost more, but we’re also getting the tax.
PW: I believe the Prime Minister, in an interview with the CBC said that he was thinking of getting rid of this thing, anyway. [The quote I’m reaching for here is: “Look, what we did this week is something that I think we were going to do anyways, in the end, for the deal.” At 1:07 in this video. — pw] Why do you think he would have been leaning in that direction? And do you think that absent a Truth Social post by President Trump, he actually would have gotten rid of the thing?
Christians: I can’t speculate too much about the politics of this, because I’m not talking to many of the people that make policy, but I know the complaints about the DST, and I don’t dispute them. It was going to be a complicated tax to collect and it was going to be messy in terms of compliance. There’s a lot of uncertainty around the tax and I know there’s always an enormous amount of pressure to reduce all taxes. There’s always going to be that segment of society that sees taxes being thrown down the drain and not as an investment in the society that we want to live in.
American companies are famous for investing their money on lobbying and not in taxes. They spend their money convincing us that it would be bad for us to tax them, and they can spend a much smaller percentage of their money on lobbying and get us to believe that narrative. And the narrative is that somehow, if we tax Google, Google will go away and we won’t be able to use it. That Google won’t innovate. It’s nonsense, but it’s a story that resonates nonetheless. Was Prime Minister Carney pressured to get rid of the DST? Undoubtedly. And maybe he personally thinks there’s a better way to tax these companies than with an excise tax. I don’t fault him for thinking that. I have even written that there are better ways for Canada to collect this tax than the Digital Services Tax.
PW: I’m going to want you to tell me about these other ways. But I assume that if a Canadian government attempts any of these other ways, then the companies we’re talking about know that all they have to do is hit the Trump button and the pressure will be right back on.
Christians: That’s correct. There are a couple of [alternatives to the DST]. We could, like some other countries have done, redefine the types of income that we subject to withholding taxes in Canada. It’s a complicated technical idea, but basically any payments that go from our advertisers to Google, we could impose a withholding tax simply by expanding a couple of definitions in the Income Tax Act that would then carry over into our treaty. Now, people will push back on that, and say that you’re changing a deal, and people will object to that. And we can have an argument about that, but that possibility exists. That withholding tax is the most straightforward way to do this and we should probably already be thinking about it.
Another one that’s kind of fun, which I really enjoyed learning about when I came to Canada, is Section 19 in the Income Tax Act. So, Canadian advertisers are paying Google now, instead of a Canadian newspaper. Well, Section 19 basically says that whenever someone makes a payment for advertising to a foreign, non-Canadian media, that payment’s not deductible.
Now that provision seems to violate Free Trade rules because it changes, depending on who you make the payment to. But it’s a provision in law. The US objected to it when we adopted it by imposing a reciprocal tax on US advertisers paying Canadian outlets, which doesn’t seem to bother anybody.
PW: But the application of that will be very asymmetrical, right?
Christians: Yes, for sure. And I’ll tell you what the Canadian media noticed when we started paying for digital newspapers online: that they’re not subject to Section 19 — only print and traditional media are subject to this denial of deduction — and Canadian media advocated for this denial of deduction for online publications as well.
All you have to do is look at the wording of Section 19 — and you don’t even have to change the words — and all of a sudden all those payments to Google are not deductible. But if the payments were to Crave, they would be deductible, and if they are to the Globe and Mail, or other Canadian companies, they would be deductible. That is a different kind of advantage for the Canadian competitor that’s a little less susceptible to Trump’s understanding, and a little less susceptible to the politics that surround the Digital Services Tax. But it’s technical. You have to explain it to people, and they don’t believe you. It’s hard to understand it.
PW: Theoretically a two-time central-bank governor could wrap his head around it.
Christians: Yes, I think he could fully understand it, for sure. You’re absolutely right. Will he want to do it, though? I just don’t know.
PW: You said that there are other jurisdictions that continue, today, to successfully tax the web giants. Who are you thinking of?
Christians: Well, Austria’s been doing the Digital Service Tax since the beginning. The UK has the Diverted Profits Tax that they’ve been using. Australia has one that’s been enforced. Austria stands out because I think it was 2017, in Trump’s 1st term, and it was part of a group that Trump threatened to retaliate against, but they just quietly kept going and they’re still collecting it. Part of the narrative is that we, Canada, came too late to the DST party. We just weren’t part of that initial negotiation. We came in too late, and then it was too obvious, and people were able to isolate us from the pack.
PW: My understanding is we’re looking at a hypothetical $7.2 billion in revenue over 5 years. And that represents a shortfall that’s going to have to be found either in other revenue sources or in spending cuts, or in greater debt. Aside from the DST, do you think Canada could use a general overhaul of its tax code?
Christians: Always. Yes, absolutely! Taxes are funny, right? Because they come into every single political battle, and what ends up happening is that politicians treat the Tax Act and the tax system as a present-giving machinery, and not as a clear policy deliverance system.
I am, every day, surprised at how complicated the Canadian tax system is. It’s way too complicated. You can’t even fill out your own tax return in this country. You’re going to make mistakes because it’s just too ridiculously written. It’s too confusing. It’s too messy. So it’s time to take another look. But you need a commission [like the 1962 Carter royal commission on taxation]. You need to be bipartisan. You need to spend money on that. You need to think that the things that you do have long-term effects, and this takes political courage. And basically it requires upsetting a bunch of people and resetting things, and we just might not be at the right time politically to be doing that because people feel vulnerable to volatility from abroad. So it may not be the time to push that.
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Business
The CBC is a government-funded giant no one watches

This article supplied by Troy Media.
By Kris Sims
The CBC is draining taxpayer money while Canadians tune out. It’s time to stop funding a media giant that’s become a political pawn
The CBC is a taxpayer-funded failure, and it’s time to pull the plug. Yet during the election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pump another $150 million into the broadcaster, even as the CBC was covering his campaign. That’s a blatant conflict of interest, and it underlines why government-funded journalism must end.
The CBC even reported on that announcement, running a headline calling itself “underfunded.” Think about that. Imagine being a CBC employee asking Carney questions at a campaign news conference, while knowing that if he wins, your employer gets a bigger cheque. Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has pledged to defund the CBC. The broadcaster is literally covering a story that determines its future funding—and pretending there’s no conflict.
This kind of entanglement isn’t journalism. It’s political theatre. When reporters’ paycheques depend on who wins the election, public trust is shattered.
And the rot goes even deeper. In the Throne Speech, the Carney government vowed to “protect the institutions that bring these cultures and this identity to the world, like CBC/RadioCanada.” Before the election, a federal report recommended nearly doubling the CBC’s annual funding. Former heritage minister Pascale St-Onge said Canada should match the G7 average of $62 per person per year—a move that would balloon the CBC’s budget to $2.5 billion annually. That would nearly double the CBC’s current public funding, which already exceeds $1.2 billion per year.
To put that in perspective, $2.5 billion could cover the annual grocery bill for more than 150,000 Canadian families. But Ottawa wants to shovel more cash at an organization most Canadians don’t even watch.
St-Onge also proposed expanding the CBC’s mandate to “fight disinformation,” suggesting it should play a formal role in “helping the Canadian population understand fact-based information.” The federal government says this is about countering false or misleading information online—so-called “disinformation.” But the Carney platform took it further, pledging to “fully equip” the CBC to combat disinformation so Canadians “have a news source
they know they can trust.”
That raises troubling questions. Will the CBC become an official state fact-checker? Who decides what qualifies as “disinformation”? This isn’t about journalism anymore—it’s about control.
Meanwhile, accountability is nonexistent. Despite years of public backlash over lavish executive compensation, the CBC hasn’t cleaned up its act. Former CEO Catherine Tait earned nearly half a million dollars annually. Her successor, Marie Philippe Bouchard, will rake in up to $562,700. Bonuses were scrapped after criticism—but base salaries were quietly hiked instead. Canadians struggling with inflation and rising costs are footing the bill for bloated executive pay at a broadcaster few of them even watch.
The CBC’s flagship English-language prime-time news show draws just 1.8 per cent of available viewers. That means more than 98 per cent of TV-viewing Canadians are tuning out. The public isn’t buying what the CBC is selling—but they’re being forced to pay for it anyway.
Government-funded journalism is a conflict of interest by design. The CBC is expensive, unpopular, and unaccountable. It doesn’t need more money. It needs to stand on its own—or not at all.
Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
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