EXCLUSIVE — Congressional committees headed by Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) are demanding information from the Wikimedia Foundation about the efforts of “foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars” to “manipulate” information on Wikipedia and shape American public opinion, according to a letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.
Comer and Mace charge that there have been “systematic” operations undertaken to “advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles,” as well as a coordinated effort on the part of a “hostile nation-state actor” to flood Wikipedia with pro-Russian and anti-Western messaging through Wikipedia edits. The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, led by Comer and Mace, respectively, are requesting the Wikimedia Foundation provide them with internal records so they can investigate the extent to which such campaigns have been successful.
To support their claims, Comer and Mace cite two studies.
The first, conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, identified a group of 30 editors who appeared to act in a coordinated fashion to edit pages related to Israel and the Palestinian state to amplify criticism about the former while downplaying negative information about the latter. According to the ADL, these editors communicated with each other extensively, made multiple edits on the same pages within short time periods, harassed dissenting editors, and voted in conjunction with one another to delete information critical of Palestinians while keeping negative information related to Israelis.
The second study mentioned in Comer and Mace’s letter was conducted by the Atlantic Council and found that an operation linked to the Kremlin, dubbed the Pravda Network, has been working to place pro-Russian narratives in Wikipedia articles as a means to influence the outputs of popular large language models such as ChatGPT. The Atlantic Council’s investigation uncovered that 1,672 Wikipedia pages across 44 different languages cited fake news aggregation websites linked to the Russian government.
The studies cited in the congressional letter, as well as the letter itself, highlighted the importance of Wikipedia in training AI chatbots, an increasingly common tool for seeking information.
In addition to being influenced from the outside, the Wikimedia Foundation also doles out hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to activist groups seeking to bring the online encyclopedia more in line with traditionally left-of-center points of view. For instance, its 2022-2023 tax documents indicate that the philanthropy made grants to organizations such as Art+Feminism, Whose Knowledge, and Black Lunch Table, all of which conduct coordinated editing operations.
Art+Feminism, for instance, mobilizes its members to correct alleged “gender biases in biographical articles.” Meanwhile, Whose Knowledge aims to “decolonize the internet.”
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In service of their investigation, Comer and Mace are requesting reams of documents from the Wikimedia Foundation, including records about “possible coordination by nation state actors in editing activities on Wikipedia,” records related to similar coordination schemes originating on college campuses, records from Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee related to disputes with such actors, information about the editors the letter alleges are operating in bad faith, Wikipedia’s internal policies related to ensuring neutrality, and any internal analysis on “patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel.”
The Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.