Since October 7, roughly 40 Wikipedia editors have worked to “delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years,” according to a new report.
Dozens of editors of the Wikipedia site have coordinated to promote radical Islamist ideas and undercut the Jewish state on the popular online encyclopedia, according to Pirate Wires. In addition to the editors, the group Tech For Palestine made a similar push to propagandize Wikipedia’s pages, though the group stopped its efforts once they were discovered.
“A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio ‘office hour’ chats — to alter over 100 articles,” according to the Pirate Wires report.
“Type ‘Zionism’ into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: ‘Zionism as settler colonialism,’ ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’ (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,’ and ‘Racism in Israel,’” it added.
Google grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status, allowing Wikipedia articles to be listed first on any topic-related search result, according to the report.
“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” a source told Pirate Wires. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article’s introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”
The groups perpetrating this diabolical effort violate a guideline called Canvassing, which “prohibits secret coordination with the ‘intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way,’” according to Pirate Wires.
“To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags,” the report explains. “They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles.”
One example: an article about Hitler supporter Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, that showed Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp, had the photo removed.
Another example: an article called “Zionism, race and genetics,” later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism,” tried to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th-century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis.
A third example: an Iran-sympathizing editor edited an article on the Mahsa Amini protests to make it look like there was widespread support for the Iranian regime and “whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators,” according to Pirate Wires.
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