WASHINGTON — House Republicans launched an investigation this week into claims that US academics and foreigners are conspiring to make bad-faith edits to Wikipedia to manipulate public opinion about Israel and Ukraine.
The collaborative online encyclopedia is the 11th-most-visited US website and often is a first stop for researching a topic or public figure. It also feeds AI tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT.
House Oversight Committee Republicans on Wednesday demanded information from Wikipedia, citing allegations of tampering detailed by the Atlantic Council, a pro-Ukraine think tank, and the Anti-Defamation League, a group that opposes antisemitism.
The Atlantic Council alleged in April that pro-Moscow agents are using a constellation of phony news sources “as an information laundromat, amplifying and saturating the news cycle with tropes emanating from Russian news outlets and Kremlin-aligned Telegram channels.”
Those sites are then “posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia … rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine,” with 1,907 Wikipedia citations citing alleged Russian propaganda sites in a sample of 1,672 pages in 44 languages, including 133 citations on English Wikipedia.
The ADL, meanwhile, said in a March report that it found evidence that “at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.”
The group of 30 allegedly left a digital trail showing they were “much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia” and appeared to “coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.”
Anyone can revise Wikipedia articles and special volunteer editors settle disputes — with the leaning of their decisions spurring long-standing allegations of bias, including from cofounder Larry Sanger.
Although Wikipedia has irked Republicans for many years, lawmakers are now citing concern that new AI tools pull heavily from the site, potentially mainstreaming skewed information about the two foreign hotspots.
ChatGPT, for example, pulled 7.8% of its citations from Wikipedia between August 2024 and June 2025, according to data from AI analytics firm Profound. High-quality news sites also are commonly referenced, with 0.7% of citations during that time coming from The Post.
In the same period, 0.6% of Google’s AI citations were from Wikipedia, with a particularly high proportion used for current events topics. The explanations carry added weight globally due to the dominance of the Chrome browser and Google’s search engine.
‘We seek your assistance’
Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and member Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) wrote that the panel is “investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.”
“We seek your assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics,” the Republicans wrote.
“Multiple studies and reports have highlighted efforts to manipulate information on the Wikipedia platform for propaganda aimed at Western audiences,” the missive says.
“One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel. A second investigation detailed actions by hostile nation-state actors to expose Western audiences to pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messaging by manipulating Wikipedia articles and other news outlets relied on for training AI chatbots.”
The ADL and Atlantic Council reports do not appear to finger American academic institutions, but the emergence of such evidence likely would become a major political issue.
The Trump administration has cited anti-Israel protests featuring antisemitic demonstrations to pause federal grants to many of the nation’s top schools.
President Trump insisted this week that Harvard University pay a $500 million penalty for allegedly doing too little to rein in Jew hatred after Columbia University paid $200 million.
But determining the culpability of editors could be difficult because they often are anonymous — meaning it may be difficult to determine if an account associated with a university’s IP address is linked to a professor or is simply a student.
Congressional Republicans spent much of the Biden administration objecting to political pressure on web platforms and news outlets to police speech, including when 51 former US intelligence operatives falsely suggested in October 2020 that Russia was behind The Post’s reporting on files linking President Biden to his son Hunter’s business deals in China and Ukraine.
The House GOP inquiry into Wikipedia does not demand censorship, but expresses interest in a “better understanding of the individuals caught engaging in prohibited behavior.”
It is, in some cases, illegal for foreign actors to engage in US public relations work without registration or to hire others to do so on their behalf.
“The Committee recognizes that virtually all web-based information platforms must contend with bad actors and their efforts to manipulate. Our inquiry seeks information to help our examination of how Wikipedia responds to such threats and how frequently it creates accountability when intentional, egregious, or highly suspicious patterns of conduct on topics of sensitive public interest are brought to attention,” Comer and Mace wrote.
“This includes questions concerning the tools and methods Wikipedia utilizes to identify and stop malicious conduct that injects bias or undermines a neutral point of view on its platform.”
The committee set a Sept. 10 deadline for Wikipedia to provide documents, including internal communications about the alleged instances of anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine bias and “[r]ecords showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by [Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee].”
The Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement that it “received the request” and was “reviewing it closely.”
“We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform,” the foundation said.
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