Larry Sanger is a co-founder of the website Wikipedia. He is credited with coining the name of the site and writing the majority of its original governing policy. He also worked on Nupedia, Citizendium, and Everipedia and he was a former Philosophy Professor at Ohio State University.
In 2007, however, Sanger called Wikipedia “broken beyond repair.” Early on, left-wing activists made a large effort to take over any politically-charged areas of the site and write one-sided articles. For a very long time now, they have blocked writers from adding balance to these entries.
Now Larry Sanger is denouncing what he calls “the insane left-ward drive” of Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. He also suggested that these sites should lose their Section 230 legal protections because they are no longer open platforms, but “pick and choose info publishers.” Section 230 protects all these websites from many kinds of lawsuits on the grounds that they are supposed to be “neutral” open platforms and not publishers.
Sanger also publicly challenged Jimmy Wales on the issue. Wales is another co-founder of Wikipedia, who publicly supports maintaining the Section 230 legal protections.
Currently, US Congressmen Paul Gosar and Tulsi Gabbard are sponsoring a bill in the US House that would add limits to this legal protection. US President Donald Trump is currently demanding that Section 230 protection be limited in the NDAA (defense spending) bill. His argument is that allowing non-neutral publishers to enjoy these protections is a danger to national security.
Losing Section 230 protection would mean major changes to social media outlets like Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter unless they rolled back years of censorship. Wikipedia would probably simply shut down if they lost Section 230 protections.
