U.S. Attorney Targets Wikipedia for Disinformation, Spread of Propaganda by Foreign Sources

The world’s largest online encyclopedia is drawing new scrutiny from President Trump’s Justice Department for allegedly skewing facts and rewriting American history to benefit foreign powers looking to sow division among the American public.The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward R. Martin, Jr., wrote the nonprofit organization requesting details about how it corrects bad information, safeguards the public from disinformation, and ensures its editors are not influenced by funders and sponsors. “It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States,” Mr. Martin wrote in a letter to “Whom It May Concern” and delivered to a P.O. box purportedly owned by the company. “Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” he wrote.Mr. Martin said Wikipedia’s operations are directed by a board composed primarily of foreign nationals “subverting the interests of American taxpayers.” He said that its mission as a neutral educational resource is benefiting “foreign powers,” and its tax-exempt status could be at risk for violating its “legal obligations and fiduciary duties.” “The public is entitled to rely on a reasonable expectation of neutrality, transparency, and accountability in its operations and publications,” he warned. He added that Wikipedia’s arrangement with Google, the world’s largest search engine, to prioritize “biased, unreliable” or otherwise harmful Wikipedia entries could “amplify propaganda to a larger American audience.”Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia.org, which is incorporated in Washington, contains more than 60 million articles in 329 languages. It is the ninth-most visited domain on the Internet, with 4 billion visits every month, 25 percent of which originate in America, according to the website traffic checker, Similarweb. In February, Mr. Sanger, long disenchanted by his creation, asked Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to determine whether federal employees were using taxpayer time and resources to rewrite posts. Mr. Sanger told The New York Sun that Wikipedia may be the “biggest propaganda organ” in the world and has been used by American administrations to “manage public opinion.”Wikipedia claims that anyone can edit its pages, however, the site has a tiered system of editors whose leadership is mostly anonymous. It has long been accused of limiting access to edits and reverting to older entries after corrections have been made, including by authors editing their own biographies. A secondary market of approved editors has emerged for hire by individuals and groups seeking to fix inaccurate Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia has been accused in several nations, including Spain, Japan, Croatia, and India, of using its authority for the benefit of one political viewpoint. While Wikipedia has a “neutral point of view” policy, studies, including a report by the Manhattan Institute in June 2024, have demonstrated that it favors “positive” sentiments for left-leaning public figures while issuing “negative” sentiments about right-leaning figures. In February, the conservative Media Research Center issued a report saying that 100 percent of conservative press outlets, including Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Newsmax, OANN, and the Media Research Center, have been “blackballed” by Wikipedia editors. “Meanwhile, leftist media like The Atlantic, Jacobin, Mother Jones, ProPublica, The Guardian, and National Public Radio are given the green light,” wrote the report’s author, Luis Cornelio. “This blatant misinformation means that Wikipedia is purposely feeding Americans information exclusively through the lens of one side of the political spectrum — the left.”Wikipedia has its own entry about its political bias which acknowledges studies showing its tendency to suppress ideological diversity. It offers a guide to editors to improve neutrality and file requests for revisions.Mr. Martin asked Wikipedia to reply by May 15 to a series of 12 questions about how it is safeguarding its information from bias and correcting the record once an article has been revised. He noted that large language models now use Wikipedia to teach artificial intelligence, which means information developed in the future may be subject to bias. “If the data provided is manipulated, particularly by foreign actors and entities, Wikipedia’s relationship with generative AI platforms have the potential to launder information on behalf of foreign actors,” he wrote.

U.S. Attorney Targets Wikipedia for Disinformation, Spread of Propaganda by Foreign Sources

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