Pro-Hamas editors insert anti-Israel bias into Wikipedia

A large, powerful group of pro-Hamas editors is using Wikipedia as a tool to delegitimise and demonise Israel and the Jewish people by systematically changing and omitting things in its articles.

This was exposed by Ashley Rindsberg on Pirate Wires, an online media company reporting on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture, on 24 October. He explained that these editors were “hijacking Wikipedia, pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda by erasing key facts about Hamas, and reshaping the narrative around Israel with alarming influence”.

Rindsberg said that the co-ordinated campaign was led by about 40 veteran Wikipedia editors and a Discord channel of 8 000 editors called Tech For Palestine.

He said that it had been happening for years, as Wikipedia is a platform that prides itself on the fact that it’s free for anyone to use. However, since 7 October 2023, there had been more of a concerted effort to distort the narrative through the website.

In the welcoming message to the 8 000-strong Discord channel, Tech For Palestine, Wikipedia Collaboration, poses, “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource and its content influences public perception.”

One member of this channel questioned the veracity of reports on sexual violence by Hamas on 7 October, and added to Wikipedia articles about the rape committed by Hamas on 7 October false claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians.

Rolene Marks, a Middle East commentator and the spokesperson for the South African Zionist Federation, said, “It’s no secret that well-coordinated groups have infiltrated everywhere, school systems, university campuses, and Wikipedia is no exception. And we know that there are at least 40 different groups that have managed to hijack the narrative on Israel by editing Wikipedia articles.”

Marks said it worried her that “the editors have revised Jewish history, are changing the definitions of Jewish events, changing definitions of things like Zionism, and engaging in Holocaust revisionism. They are also erasing Hamas’s history, Hamas’s charter, and definitions. They have erased the fact that Hamas has called for the extermination of the Jewish people.”

Rindsberg said one member of these groups, with the username Iskandar323, removed mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel from the Wikipedia article on Hamas. That same user also removed 22 000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that was critical of the organisation, ultimately deleting a 1 000-word passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel.

This user also deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government, and removed an account of 16th-century Jewish immigration to Israel from an article about the history of Israel.

These editors are getting away with it because they use their know-how about Wikipedia to co-ordinate efforts without raising any red flags. They work in small clusters, and on their own, the edits can seem minimal.

Said Gus Silber, a journalist and the author of books covering South African socio-political satire, innovation in business, entrepreneurship, and technology, “Wikipedia is a hugely active community of people which instantly notices changes and bias in articles, and then will correct them because Wikipedia is, by its nature and its mission, a crowdsourced encyclopaedia which technically means that anybody can edit and therefore anybody can impose a specific view on articles. But the way Wikipedia works is that viewpoints are quickly noticed and subject to being changed and revised by people with opposing ideological viewpoints.”

Said Marks, “We live in a time when people don’t read books, they don’t do proper research, they don’t go to proper resources, they use platforms like Wikipedia, like TikTok to learn, and we certainly see the ramifications on our streets. They don’t take information from credible sources, rather from the easiest they find available. And it’s causing real problems. We see it with the proliferation of antisemitism, which very often ends in violence. And we’re seeing it with massive misinformation and disinformation campaigns. We’re fighting a war not just on the kinetic battlefield, but in the information battlefield, and Wikipedia has been weaponised by Israel’s enemies and the enemies of the West as an information weapon against us.”

For example, If one were to type “Zionism” into the search bar on Wikipedia, aside from the main article on Zionism, the auto-fill returns as “Zionism as Settler Colonialism”; “Zionism in the Age of Dictators”, a book written by a pro-Palestinian Lenni Brenner; “Zionism from the standpoints of its victims”; and “Racism in Israel”.

The edits made to these articles have enabled many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies to be violated. “Wikipedia has what’s meant to be a very strict policy called neutral point of view [NPOV], that particularly applies to any kind of information that may be subject to ideological bias in one direction or another,” said Silber. “But NPOV, of course, is subject to a lot of disclaimers because the reality is that people will impose their points of view on articles. So, in effect, what’s happening and what very often happens in conflict scenarios or politically contentious scenarios is that Wikipedia becomes a battleground of ideas, and a neutral point of view very much becomes a biased point of view.”

There have been various attempts by users to submit cases of false information to Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, made up of 12 volunteers.

“Wikipedia is quite an idealistic venture,” Silber said. “It’s meant to be a democratic way for people to access unbiased information, but the reality is that this doesn’t happen. It’s important not to take Wikipedia articles at face value, but to delve into them as fields of active and contested information.

“People who use Wikipedia need to educate themselves to be savvy enough to be able to recognise instantly when they’re being misinformed and when Wikipedia’s policy of neutrality is in effect being violated,” Silber said.

However, for journalist and adjunct professor of journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, Anton Harber, “the narrative around Israel-Palestine has changed, so you would expect this to be played out in contestation over how it is represented on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is crowdsourced, so it’s going to be a site of narrative struggle at a time like this. Those who don’t like the changes can engage and make their changes, or hold the editors to account for their accuracy. But it’s important to realise that it will inevitably reflect changes in the way the world sees Israel. Even Israel’s closest allies are questioning its conduct, so it will inevitably be reflected in media such as Wikipedia.”

For Silber, “The only way to counter misinformation on Wikipedia is to use the power of Wikipedia, which is the crowdsourced power, to correct and to edit.”