A groundbreaking investigation by the Anti-Defamation League has uncovered a supposedly deliberate and coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, injecting antisemitic and anti-Israel biases into the online encyclopedia's articles. According to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Tuesday, titled "Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia's Neutrality," a group of at least 30 editors has engaged in a years-long effort to distort content, violating Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality. The findings, detailed in a press release from ADL, expose how these editors have systematically altered articles to downplay Palestinian antisemitism and violence while amplifying criticism of Israel. Israel Hayom has not been able to independently confirm the findings and no comment has been made by Wikipedia.
The ADL report, a collaborative effort with the Center for Technology and Society, analyzed thousands of edits and chat logs dating back to 2002. It identifies a cohort of "bad-faith" editors who have made over one million edits across more than 10,000 articles related to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These individuals, some dedicating up to eight hours a day to their activities, worked in concert to reshape narratives, often removing references to peer-reviewed studies on Palestinian violence, such as suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, and minimizing Hamas's designation as a terrorist organization, according to the report. For instance, the report notes that edits to the Hamas Wikipedia page buried mentions of its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and excised details of the October 7, 2023, attack that killed over 1,100 people, the ADL said.
In one striking example cited by ADL, an article on Zionism was redefined as an "ethnocultural nationalist movement" aimed at creating "a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible." This framing, the report argues, deviates from neutral historical context and aligns with anti-Israel rhetoric. Similarly, edits to the page of Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese terrorist convicted of murdering five people, including two children, in Israel, removed references to his crimes and US designations, presenting a sanitized version of his actions. The ADL emphasizes that such changes reflect a broader pattern of bias, particularly pronounced in Arabic-language Wikipedia articles, which the report claims exhibit widespread pro-Hamas sentiment with little to no credible citations.
The implications of this campaign are significant, given Wikipedia's status as a widely trusted source. "Most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform manipulated by agenda-driven editors on many topics," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement quoted by the report. The report suggests that this coordinated effort not only undermines the site's credibility but also risks amplifying antisemitic narratives to millions of users worldwide. It further notes that the editors' actions contravene Wikipedia's own policies, which mandate neutrality and prohibit coordinated efforts to push specific viewpoints.
In response, ADL has proposed several recommendations, including urging Wikipedia to strengthen its oversight mechanisms and calling on search engines like Google to reconsider using Wikipedia as a primary source until these biases are addressed. The report's release coincides with ongoing debates about the platform's reliability, especially after a June 2024 Wikipedia community consensus deemed ADL itself "generally unreliable" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a decision ADL condemned as part of a campaign to delegitimize the organization.
