Feds Threaten Wikipedia After Right-Wing Media Uproar

Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”

The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

The letter said:

Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.

Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).

Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.

‘Notice a theme?’

Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”

Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:

• “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
• “How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
• “Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)

“More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”

(Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)

‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’

Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.

This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.

Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk  (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”

For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).

Capturing online media

AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.

One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.

Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).

Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).

“In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.

The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.