Oversight Committee to Investigate Alleged Anti-Israel, Pro-Kremlin Information Manipulation by Wikipedia
“One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.”
Wikipedia has long been viewed by conservatives as an untrustworthy site, one whose political pages are little more than propaganda arms for leftist public figures and their pet causes. One of the site’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, spoke out in 2020 about Wikipedia’s extensive left-wing bias, which he suggested started around 2011.
“…as liberals made, or leftists made, their march through the institutions, Wikipedia became one of those influential institutions … and [the left] basically took it over,” Sanger stated in a 2021 interview. A 2024 study, done by a writer at City Journal, appeared to confirm their hard-left tilt.
Legal Insurrection has been writing since 2012 about how easy it is to manipulate information on Wikipedia, with their deliberate shrinking of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee/Native American entry being a pretty solid indicator of the political leanings of their “volunteer editors.”
Over the past year or so, however, there have been troubling allegations of information manipulation involving anti-Israel, antisemitic sentiment among editors, a development Legal Insurrection has also previously covered:
- Wikipedia is Pushing Disinformation About Israel and Jews
- Anti-Israel Activist Editors at Wikipedia Have Hijacked the ‘Palestine’ Narrative
- Wikipedia Editors Won’t Allow Gaza Health Ministry to be Called ‘Hamas Run’
- ADL Report Claims Wikipedia Editors Colluded on Long-Term Anti-Israel Campaign
As it turns out, word of those allegations, as well as claims of a pro-Kremlin/anti-Western bent, has caught the attention of the House Oversight Committee. Accordingly, its chairman, James Comer (R-KY), sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia site, on Thursday detailing the allegations and requesting documents and other information (PDF):
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion. We seek your assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics.
Multiple studies and reports have highlighted efforts to manipulate information on the Wikipedia platform for propaganda aimed at Western audiences. One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel. A second investigation detailed actions by hostile nation-state actors to expose Western audiences to pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messaging by manipulating Wikipedia articles and other news outlets relied on for training AI chatbots.
[…]
Our inquiry seeks information to help our examination of how Wikipedia responds to such threats and how frequently it creates accountability when intentional, egregious, or highly suspicious patterns of conduct on topics of sensitive public interest are brought to attention. This includes questions concerning the tools and methods Wikipedia utilizes to identify and stop malicious conduct that injects bias or undermines a neutral point of view on its platform. We also seek to better our understanding of the individuals caught engaging in prohibited behavior.
The X account WikiBias, which has extensively documented the alleged anti-Israel/pro-Hamas editing at Wikipedia, also shared the news:
Congress adopted reports on efforts to manipulate Wikipedia for propaganda targeting Western audiences and is launching an official investigation.
Hallelujah! @ADL, @AshleyRindsberg, @shlomitlir, @bandlersbanter pic.twitter.com/sxu7tJJJPJ— WikiBias (@WikiBias2024) August 28, 2025
PirateWires senior editor Ashley Rindsberg noted that the investigation was launched primarily based on a report he’d done on the issue back in October:
The piece shows how 40 anti-Israel editors – the Gang of 40 – made a collective 850,000 edits to 10,000 articles, completely reshaping the PIA (Palestine Israel articles) topic area.
The Gang of 40 works to severs historical, spiritual and cultural ties between the land and the Jewish people by removing those ties in articles, from the biggest broad-stroke to the most trivial (seeming) minutiae.
The main thrust of the Gang of 40, however, is to paint Israel as a “settler colonial” occupier – a goal is has achieved with surprising success.
Four months after my piece came out, Wikipedia’s “Supreme Court,” ArbCom, held one of its most sweeping arbitration proceedings in years. Six leading editors from the G40 were handed indefinite topic ban. One admin was warned by ArbCom.
Congress has announced an investigation into Wikipedia. The investigation was triggered in large part by my @PirateWires report from October, "How Wikipedia's Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative."
The piece shows how 40 anti-Israel editors – the Gang of 40… https://t.co/2Ee6ajWS7X pic.twitter.com/9b7VCdaoqq
— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) August 28, 2025
Jewish News Syndicate‘s U.S. national correspondent, Aaron Bandler, has also closely tracked how Wikipedia has allegedly taken sides in the Israel-Hamas war, and filed this report in June:
The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not.
Bandler also interviewed Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, after news broke this week of the Oversight Committee’s investigation. Sanger revealed how he had communicated earlier this year with President Donald Trump and then-DOGE advisor Elon Musk about actions they could take on the matter:
“I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia,” Sanger, who has criticized Wikipedia frequently in recent years, told JNS.
Sanger told JNS that he asked U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who led the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, in February to enact a policy barring federal workers from editing Wikipedia on the clock and preventing federal dollars from funding edits to the encyclopedia.
“There is clearly massive support for this sort of investigation,” Sanger said.
As for the pro-Kremlin allegations, Atlantic Council research associate Valentin Châtelet wrote a piece on the topic in April, which the committee cited in its report:
The Pravda network acts as an information laundromat, amplifying and saturating the news cycle with tropes emanating from Russian news outlets and Kremlin-aligned Telegram channels. During the 2024 “super-election year,” the network created websites specifically targeting NATO, as well as Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and other world leaders and politicians.
This strategy, in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.
The committee is requesting that the Wikimedia Foundation supply certain records and information covering the period from January 1, 2023, to now by September 10, 2025. As always, stay tuned.
– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –
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Comments
wiki is like the public school system
except it doesnt rely on tax funding ( that I know of)
SO INSTEAD of going after the leftists at wiki
go after the real treachery aka tax funded publicly funded schools
the gop once again is putting on an act which wastes our time and money
when with one resounding loud session could turn these school unions on their heads
I agree. But I would hope we could walk (all over the totalitarian socialist government school system) and chew gum (shred public sector unions and tax exempt status for propaganda media) at the same time.
true
but the gop is acting
we arent
So Wikipedia has their collective thumbs on the scales? Shocking!
.
These chuckleheads have perverted history to the degree it may not ever be corrected. Imagine, a free resource replacing an established icon ( say, Encyclopedia Britannica… plus others…) which allows editing moment by moment…. By the Moron Of The Day! Let it run for a few years and the result is worse than a mainline sewer line collapse…. What is real? What is vaguely shadowed??? And now they are begging alms?? These folks are fraudsters. Banish them all!
“allows editing moment by moment…. By the Moron Of The Day!”
Reminds me of Heinlein’s observation:
“Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something. Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that over again, too. Who decides?”
Crowdsourcing does work, and often produces very good results. But it has to be real crowdsourcing. You can’t set up an electoral system in which one monomaniac can subvert the law of large numbers.
But I just read a message from the founder asking for a donation to help continue the important work of providing unbiased information to the public. He also noted that only 2% of their users contribute to this important work. Are these the same people who contribute to NPR?
Yes, the one’s that willingly fork over their money to support NPR are the same ones that fork over their money to support leftist websites like wikipedia. Wikipedia, where morons and retards of any stripe are allowed to edit the articles . . . for free!
Waste of time. Do they think they’re going to put the smoke back into the firecracker?
Conquest’s Second Law is nothing more than a restatement of the truism that if the captain doesn’t secure the ship’s rations in metal containers, the rats will eat them up.
Wikipedia was made to be distributed and non-hierarchical. So are rats.
The headline says “by” Wikipedia; it should say “on”. Wikipedia is not manipulating anything; the manipulation is happening on it.