by Gareth321 | 2025-09-05 13:54:54+00:00
I can, but perhaps not with the specificity that you'd like. I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group; the various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.

Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.

It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.

The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*

I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.