 | |
Type of site | News, Opinion and analysis |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Oak Park, Michigan |
| Owner | International Committee of the Fourth International |
| Editor | David North (editorial board chairman) |
| URL | wsws |
| Registration | No (Disqus account is required for commenting on articles) |
| Launched | February 14, 1998; 27 years ago (1998-02-14)[1] |
| Current status | Online |
TheWorld Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of theInternational Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the internationalTrotskyist movement".[2]
The WSWS was established on February 14, 1998. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008,[3] and then again on October 1, 2020.[4]
The WSWS supports and helps campaign for theSocialist Equality Parties in elections. The site has no advertisements, except for material fromMehring Books, the ICFI's publishing arm.David North serves as Chairman of the site's International Editorial Board.[5]
The WSWS periodically undertakes focused political campaigns, during which numerous articles, videos, interviews, and perspectives are published on the topic. Campaigns undertaken include defendingJulian Assange,[6]Chelsea Manning,[7] andEdward Snowden,[8] civil rights and free speech,[9][10] and the opposition to utility shutoffs and bankruptcy in Detroit.[11][12]
The WSWS described the 2014Revolution of Dignity inUkraine as a coup backed by theUnited States andGermany in which the Ukrainianfar-right coalition of organizationsRight Sector and political partySvoboda would have played a "crucial role".[13] Furthermore, the WSWS criticized the coverage of theRusso-Ukrainian War in 2014 by the majority of German media outlets, describing it was one-sided and "anti-Russian propaganda". Thus, leading outlets such asDer Spiegel andDie Zeit would have been clamouring for military action against Russia and attacking thePresident of RussiaVladimir Putin, "who is portrayed as a new Hitler and an aggressor".[14]
About the shootdown of theMalaysia 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 theassassination 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".[15] On February 22, 2022 the WSWS issued a statement opposing Putin's invasion of Ukraine, calling for the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers against both Putin and NATO.[16]
According to Julianne Tvetan writing inIn These Times in July 2017, the WSWS drew attention to newGooglesearch algorithms intended to removefake news, which WSWS believed to be a form ofcensorship by Google.[17] Using evidence fromSEMrush, an analytics suite forsearch engine optimization, the WSWS alleged that several sites, such asAlterNet andGlobalresearch.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%.[2][17] Google said that it had not deliberately targeted any particular website,[2] and Google vice-president Ben Gomes wrote that Google had "adjusted [its] signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content."[18]
In 2019, WSWS received considerable attention for its criticisms of theNew York Times'The 1619 Project, which aimed to reframe American history by placing the consequences ofslavery and the contributions ofBlack 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 the2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class."[19] According toThe Washington Post:
On Dec. 16 [2020],Wall Street Journal opinion columnistElliot 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 theTwitterverse and sparked discussion about their analysis of the 1619 Project.[20]
WSWS received considerable praise from both liberal historians who contributed to their analysis and conservative commentators for its criticisms. For example, theNational Review described it as "one of the few media outlets examining the 1619 Project in critical detail" and extensively cited contributions by historiansGordon S. Wood, who in 2007 was referred to as "the favorite historian of America’s liberal establishment", andJames M. McPherson;[21][22] Phillip Magness, the research director of the right-wingAmerican Institute for Economic Research told theDartmouth 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;[23] andMichael Barone in the conservativeNew York Post gave positive attention to historianSean Wilentz's criticisms of the project in WSWS.[24]
In an article forRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Glenn Kates criticized that the Russian online newspaperVzglyad, founded by the pro-Kremlin media entrepreneurKonstantin 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, insteadVzglyad linked toAxis 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.[25]
In an article for the socialist magazineNew Politics,University of London academicGilbert 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-Trotskyistsectarian quarrels in fulfilling its role as apologist for Putin, Assad, and their friends."[26]
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”.[27][non-primary source needed]
Reason has said that a 2020 viral false account ofNew 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."[28]
Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh of theUniversity 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".[29]
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."