New report exposes dangerous influence of Wikipedia editors on anti-Israel discourse
A new ADL report exposes troubling activity by a group of 30 Wikipedia editors who’ve been influencing content with biased, anti-Israel edits.
According to the report, these editors have:
- Used tandem voting to insert anti-Israel content and exclude Palestinian terrorism details
- Removed key citations and downplayed Hamas atrocities, including sexual violence committed by terrorists on 7th October 2023
- Removed mentions of Nazi imagery adopted during protests in Gaza in 2018
- Harassed other editors, calling their work “bulls***” and labelling them “Zionists”
- Targeted good-faith editors with intimidation and frequent reports to discourage them from making edits
- Voted to delete crucial articles, such as ‘Denial of the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel’; ‘Hamas beheading incidents’; ‘Anti-semitic [sic] anti-Zionism’
The report also found that many of these editors dedicated over eight hours a day to these activities, which the report suggested may indicate full-time employment.
Campaign Against Antisemitism and others have long been calling out Wikipedia for failing to implement their own rules against obsessive anti-Israel editors who hijack entries relating to matters of Jewish concern, and the platform did recently sanction a small number of editors for their conduct.
