| World Socialist Web Site | |
| Location: | Oak Park, Michigan |
| Type: | Opinion and analysis |
| Commercial: | No (supported by donations) |
| 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 |
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". The WSWS publishes articles and analysis of news and events from around the world, updated daily. The site also includes coverage of the history of working-class political and organized labor movements.
The WSWS was established on February 14, 1998. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008, and then again on October 1, 2020.[1]
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.[2]
The WSWS publishes articles on politics, finance and economics, culture, police violence, racism, war, media and information technology, corporate power, history, and labor issues.
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".[3] 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".[4]
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".[5]
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.[6] 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%.[6] 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."
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."[7] 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.[8] 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;[9] [10] 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;[11] and Michael Barone in the conservative New York Post gave positive attention to historian Sean Wilentz's criticisms of the project in WSWS.[12]
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.[13]
In an article for the socialist magazine New Politics, the Lebanese Trotskyist 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."[14]
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”.[15]
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."[16]
Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee referred to the WSWS as "generally considered a heavily partisan venue for real reporting".[17]