Think you couldn’t be more uneasy about life under the Trump administration? Well, tell someone to hold your beer. A new wiki is tracking people who express anti-Trump sentiments online.
KeyWiki is a trove of more than 100,000 articles, most of them profiles of progressives. The organizers say the site’s aim is to “expose the political left in America by “unlocking the covert side of U.S. and global politics.” To that end, it’s publishing online dossiers on people who post negative things about President Trump, join anti-Trump online groups, or even align with groups whom it perceives to be left-leaning, reports Claire Downs of The Daily Dot.
Go ahead, look yourself up. We’ll wait.
Meet the founder of KeyWiki, Trevor Loudon
New Zealander Trevor Loudon is the WikiLeader, a longtime right-wing politico who has loudly warned against the encroachment of Communism since the 1980s. His willingness to embrace conspiracy theories makes Alex Jones look like a scientific methodist: He’s published a book called “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within,” in which he claimed the former president had a staff of Marxists who were plotting “a coordinated attempt to overthrow capitalism.”
Great to run into @SenTedCruz at a meeting for @chiproytx in the great state of #Texas! pic.twitter.com/YtroVDrO3p
— Trevor Loudon (@newzealblog) February 10, 2018
Loudon created KeyWiki in 2010 to “start profiles on 35,000 people” that he believed were “dragging America down,” he said. “We’ve got congressmen in there, “peace” activists, labor unionists, black radicals, “religious” socialists, “greenies,” left wing academics, Obama appointees and thousands of card-carrying socialists and communists,” he wrote on a site called World News Weekend.
What does KeyWiki post?
KeyWiki publishes information about progressives that can border on doxxing, and outright falsehoods. The site has published the addresses of elderly people who attended civil-rights protests decades ago; among other tools, it apparently uses automated Facebook scrapers to collect information on people who are signed up for progressive groups like Black Lives Matter, the Dot reports.
When it comes to public figures, muddying the waters is an apparent strategy: Legitimate facts and even praise for liberal leaders is mixed with right-wing editorializing. For example, Kamala Harris’s profile begins with a straightforward rundown of her career achievements and summary of a reformed-prisoner program she oversaw that swerves into disparaging gossip about her relationship with Willie Brown and her motivation for running for California District Attorney. The page layout mimics Wikipedia’s, and KeyWiki profiles are rising in search-engine rankings.
Facebook hasn’t commented on the wiki. On the subreddit /r/socialism, a poster who said he found several friends on KeyWiki (but not himself, likely because he isn’t on Facebook) advised not waiting for the social network to take action. “My first reaction was this: If you’re not on a list then you’re not doing it right. But I don’t think this is something we should just shrug off. Let’s not make things any easier for [KeyWiki],” he wrote. “Talk to your groups about security culture. Start reading subs like /r/privacy… Learn about encryption… Most importantly, move your organizations — and your personal lives — slowly but surely away from companies like Facebook and Google that do not care about your privacy.”
