World Socialist Web Site
{{short description|International socialist news site}}
{{redirects|WSWS|the radio station|WSWS (FM)}}
{{use mdy dates|date=February 2021}}
{{Infobox website
| name = World Socialist Web Site
| logo = World Socialist Web Site Logo.png
| logo_size = 265px
| url = {{URL|wsws.org}}
| location = Oak Park, Michigan
| type = Opinion and analysis
| current_status = Online
| editor = David North (editorial board chairman)
| registration = No (Disqus account is required for commenting on articles)
| owner = International Committee of the Fourth International
| launch_date = {{Start date and age|1998|02|14}}
}}
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement".
About
The WSWS was established on February 14, 1998. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008, and then again on October 1, 2020.{{cite web|url=https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/02/pers-o02.html |title=Welcome the relaunch of the World Socialist Web Site! - World Socialist Web Site |publisher=Wsws.org |date= October 2, 2020|accessdate=2022-04-13}}
The WSWS supports and helps campaign for the Socialist Equality Parties in elections. The site has no advertisements, except for material from Mehring Books, the ICFI's publishing arm. David North serves as Chairman of the site's International Editorial Board.{{cite web |title=David North speaks in Berlin on the 15th anniversary of the World Socialist Web Site |date=May 16, 2013 |url=https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/16/berl-m16.html |publisher=WSWS |access-date=3 May 2021}}
Content
The WSWS periodically undertakes focused political campaigns, during which numerous articles, videos, interviews, and perspectives are published on the topic. Campaigns undertaken include defending Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, civil rights and free speech, and the opposition to utility shutoffs and bankruptcy in Detroit.
The WSWS described the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine as a coup backed by the United States and Germany in which the Ukrainian far-right coalition of organizations Right Sector and political party Svoboda would have played a "crucial role".{{cite news|url=https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/06/the-worldwide-success-of-russian-propaganda/|title=The Worldwide Success of Russian Propaganda|first=Michael|last=Lawriwsky|newspaper=Quadrant|date=19 June 2023}} Furthermore, the WSWS criticized the coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 by the majority of German media outlets, describing it was one-sided and "anti-Russian propaganda". Thus, leading outlets such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit would have been clamouring for military action against Russia and attacking the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, "who is portrayed as a new Hitler and an aggressor".{{cite journal|url=http://www.irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/cgi-bin/irbis_nbuv/cgiirbis_64.exe?I21DBN=LINK&P21DBN=UJRN&Z21ID=&S21REF=10&S21CNR=20&S21STN=1&S21FMT=ASP_meta&C21COM=S&2_S21P03=FILA=&2_S21STR=is_2015_21_3|title=Аналіз інформаційної війни між Росією та Україною в інформаційному суспільстві|first=Mariia A.|last=Zubaryeva|journal=Informatsiyne Suspilstvo|issue=21|pages=6–11|year=2015|language=uk}} They had warned since 2014 that the objective course of events would inevitably lead to bloodshed between a NATO backed Ukraine and Russia.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/26/ukr--a26.htmlhttps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/13/nato-m13.html
About the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the WSWS stated that "Washington has presented not one shred of evidence that Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile either fired by the anti-Kiev forces or supplied by Moscow". Regarding the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, David North wrote for the WSWS that he was wondering if the United States was planning a coup to replace Putin with a "Western-friendly oligarch".{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VDklDwAAQBAJ|title=Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda|first=Oliver|last=Boyd-Barrett|publisher=Routledge|series=Media, War and Security|year=2016|doi=10.4324/9781315559681|isbn=9781317196006}}
Demotion in Google searches
According to Julianne Tvetan writing in In These Times in July 2017, the WSWS drew attention to new Google search algorithms intended to remove fake news, which WSWS believed to be a form of censorship by Google.{{cite web | title=How the "Fake News" Scare Is Marginalizing the Left | website=In These Times | date=2017-10-11 | first=Julianne | last=Tvetan | url=https://inthesetimes.com/article/fake-news-left-facebook-twitter-tech-companies | access-date=2022-08-16}} Using evidence from SEMrush, an analytics suite for search engine optimization, the WSWS alleged that several sites, such as AlterNet and Globalresearch.ca, had received reduced traffic from Google due to changes in its search algorithm. According to the WSWS, between late April 2017 and the beginning of August 2017 its Google search traffic fell by 67%. For their early and consistent reporting on not only their own but other alternative new sites’s drastic demotions in Google search results as well as being the most heavily effected site the American journalist and author Matt Taibbi reported that, “For much of the last four years, the WSWS has been a bit of a canary in the coal mine, when it comes to new forms of censorship and speech restrictions”.https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-andre-damon Google said that it had not deliberately targeted any particular website, and Google vice-president Ben Gomes wrote that Google had "adjusted [its] signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content."
Gomes’s claims were contradicted by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., during a 28 October 2020 Senate hearing when he was challenged by Utah Republican Mike Lee to name one left-wing “high profile person or entity” Google had censored and Pichai cited WSWS as the sole example.https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-andre-damon While this was primarily said in the context of WSWS’s reporting on the 1619 Project, published in 2019, a spokesperson for Google told Fox News that, "there are some examples [of censoring WSWS] that predate the 1619 Project entirely”.https://www.foxnews.com/politics/socialists-big-tech-1619-project-censorship-google.amp
Despite the significant short term effects WSWS claims they were able to recover and exceed their previous readership total within a year and a half, reporting that while in the spring of 2017 before the sudden drop in search traffic they had approximately 900,000 monthly visitors,https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html while by fall 2019 they reported topping 1 million monthly visitors.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/03/pers-s03.html
The 1619 Project
In 2019, WSWS received considerable attention for its criticisms of the New York Times' The 1619 Project, which aimed to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the country's national narrative. WSWS described the project as "one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class."{{cite web |last=Wagner |first=Laura |title=New York Times to Staff: You Can Only Trash Colleagues If You Have a Column |website=Vice |date=2020-10-16 |url=https://www.vice.com/en/article/new-york-times-opinions-only-columnists-can-trash-coworkers-1619-project/ |access-date=2022-08-17}} According to The Washington Post:
On Dec. 16 [2020], Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Elliot Kaufman brought into the mainstream criticisms of the 1619 Project from four historians who had been questioning it for months on the World Socialist website, a fringe news publication founded upon the principles of Trotskyism. Some of what those professors wrote had gained momentum in the Twitterverse and sparked discussion about their analysis of the 1619 Project.{{cite news |last=Mettler |first=Katie |title=Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. 'We disagree,' says the New York Times. |newspaper=The Washington Post |date=2019-12-22 |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/22/five-professors-say-project-should-be-amended-we-disagree-says-new-york-times/ |access-date=2022-08-17}}WSWS received considerable praise from both liberal historians who contributed to their analysis and conservative commentators for its criticisms. For example, the National Review described it as "one of the few media outlets examining the 1619 Project in critical detail" and extensively cited contributions by historians Gordon S. Wood, who in 2007 was referred to as "the favorite historian of America’s liberal establishment", and James M. McPherson;{{cite web |title=History According to the 1619 Project |website=National Review |date=2020-01-16 |url=https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-according-to-the-1619-project/ |access-date=2022-08-17}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.aei.org/articles/the-liberal-republicanism-of-gordon-wood/|title=The Liberal Republicanism of Gordon Wood | American Enterprise Institute - AEI}} Phillip Magness, the research director of the right-wing American Institute for Economic Research told the Dartmouth Review that there was a "strange alliance" between conservative historians and the Trotskyists of WSWS, who he described as "old-school historians" following the data;{{cite web |title=Debunking 1619: An Interview with Phillip W. Magness |website=The Dartmouth Review |date=2022-04-25 |url=https://dartreview.com/debunking-1619-an-interview-with-phillip-w-magness/ |access-date=2022-08-17|quote=You also had people from the far left jumping in. Some of the heaviest criticisms came from a website called the World Socialist Website, which has a Trotskyist Marxist perspective, but they’re old school historians. These are people that bring a left-wing perspective to history, but they use a methodology that’s rooted in evidence. That’s rooted in factual analysis, following the data and following the facts and the archives to where they lead. So they give a spin on it that's very different from my own, but their evidentiary approach is very similar. So I'm in the middle of a very strange coalition. And there's also conservative historians that jumped in, but a very strange coalition across the political spectrum that looked at this thing and said, "There are defects."}} and Michael Barone in the conservative New York Post gave positive attention to historian Sean Wilentz's criticisms of the project in WSWS.{{cite web |last=Barone |first=Michael |title=Scholars are eviscerating The New York Times' 1619 Project |website=New York Post |date=2020-01-25 |url=https://nypost.com/2020/01/24/scholars-are-eviscerating-the-new-york-times-1619-project/ |access-date=2022-08-17}}
A major aspect of WSWS’s analysis centered around Dunmore's Proclamation, issued by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, and the claims that the American Revolution was fought over the issue of continuing slavery. The New York Times’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein for example cited one sentence from a book by historian Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, in which she writes: “Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence” to further this argument. To counter these positions WSWS argued that Dunmore’s Proclamation was not an abolitionary promise to free the slaves in general, but instead a tactic of the British to try to keep rich slave owning landowners on their side by promising to free adult male slaves who ran away from Rebel slave owners, with the implicit statement that the only way for one to keep their slaves was loyalty to the British Crown. Runaway slaves were also frequently returned to Loyalist masters or those who changed their loyalty back to the Crown. Dunmore himself was also a slave owner and later as Royal Governor of the Bahamas imported slaves to the colony during his governorship which WSWS argues contradicts the attempt to portray him, his Proclamation, and the British in general as being abolitionary.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/28/nytr-d28.htmlMichael Craton and Gail Sanders, Islanders in the Sun, A History of the Bahamian People, 1992, Chapters 12, 13, 14 {{ISBN?}}
Criticism
In an article for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Glenn Kates criticized that the Russian online newspaper Vzglyad, founded by the pro-Kremlin media entrepreneur Konstantin Rykov, had used an article originally from the WSWS titled "Obama Backs State Terror Against Eastern Ukraine" to project its opinion on American media in general. The WSWS was not cited directly, instead Vzglyad linked to Axis of Logic, a website that had republished the WSWS's article. Kates defined this strategy as Russian media citing fringe sources from the West and giving them mainstream credibility to support Russian talking points.{{cite news|url=https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraineunspun-fringe-website-american-media/25415775.html|title=How To Project A Fringe Website Onto 'American Media'|first=Glenn|last=Kates|publisher=Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty|date=9 June 2014}}
In an article for the socialist magazine New Politics, University of London academic Gilbert Achcar described the WSWS as "pro-Putin, pro-Assad and 'left-wing' propaganda" combined with "gutter journalism ... run by a 'Trotskyist' cult ... which perpetuates a long worn-out tradition of inter-Trotskyist sectarian quarrels in fulfilling its role as apologist for Putin, Assad, and their friends."{{Cite web |last=Achcar |first=Gilbert |date=2019-10-10 |title=On Gutter Journalism and Purported "Anti-Imperialism" |url=https://newpol.org/on-gutter-journalism-and-purported-anti-imperialism/ |access-date= |website=New Politics |language=en-US}}
Responding in part to these claims the WSWS noted, in regards to Syria, that, “Gilbert Achcar, also hailed these 'revolutionaries,' in many cases discredited former regime figures. No attempt was made to describe their political programme or to explain why feudal Gulf despots who outlaw all opposition to their rule at home would support a progressive revolution abroad”.{{cite web | url=https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/15/syri-m15.html | title=The devastating impact of the 10-year US-orchestrated war on Syria | date=March 14, 2021 }}{{Primary source inline|date=July 2024}}
Reason has said that a 2020 viral false account of New York University agreeing to racially segregated student housing was partially due to an inaccurate report on the World Socialist Website. Reason commented: "As a socialist publication, TWSW sometimes criticizes the progressive left for being preoccupied with issues unrelated to class."{{cite web | last=Soave | first=Robby | title=Yes, Black NYU Students Demanded Segregated Housing. No, the University Didn't Agree to It. | website=Reason.com | date=2020-08-24 | url=https://reason.com/2020/08/24/black-nyu-students-segregated-housing-race/ | access-date=2022-08-17}}
Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee noted that WSWS publishers "challenge the view that fringe and highly partisan news websites and media ecosystems have contributed to the spread of fake news".{{cite book |last1=Haigh |first1=Maria |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337413708 |title=The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda |last2=Haigh |first2=Thomas |publisher=Sage Publishing |year=2019 |isbn=9781526486233 |editor-last1=Baines |editor-first1=Paul |pages=313 |language=en |chapter=Fighting and Framing Fake News |editor-last2=O'Shaughnessy |editor-first2=Nicholas |editor-last3=Snow |editor-first3=Nancy |chapter-url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351664353}}
References
{{reflist|refs=
{{cite web|title=IYSSE members discuss Manning imprisonment following rally|url=https://www.michigandaily.com/section/campus-life/iysse-members-discuss-manning-imprisonment-following-rally|last=Reporter|first=Ben Rosenfeld Daily Staff|website=The Michigan Daily|language=en|access-date=May 14, 2020}}
}}
External links
- {{Official website|http://www.wsws.org/}}
- [https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/bulletin/index.htm The Bulletin (1964–1974) Internet Archive], Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org
{{Socialist Equality Parties|state=expanded}}
Category:American news websites
Category:American political websites
Category:International Committee of the Fourth International
Category:Internet properties established in 1998
Category:Multilingual news services