Around 40 Wikipedia editors worked to present “radical Islamist groups in a favorable light” and craft a narrative around the Israel-Palestine conflict, according to a report from Pirate Wires.
In the weeks following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, one of the editors removed information about Hamas’ 1988 charter, which called for the killing of Jews.
Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) have been “subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict,” the report says.
Another anti-Israel campaign sought to “use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War,” the report adds. This campaign, called Tech for Palestine (TFP), edited more than 100 articles.
When “Zionism” is entered into Wikipedia’s search box, the auto-fill returns with “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators,” “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel” following the main article on “Zionism.”
These efforts led to a “wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online,” the report describes, noting that Google often loads Wikipedia articles at the top of the search results page.
The groups behind these actions violate what is called Canvassing, which prohibits one from “influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way,” according to the report. In order to avoid this guideline, pro-Palestine groups make seemingly trivial edits to articles. When viewed all together, however, the changes are “staggering.”
For example, one Wikipedia editor removed the “Land of Israel” from a sentence pertaining to the origin of Jewish people. The user changed “’Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant’ to ‘Ethnoreligious group and cultural community,’” Pirate Wires explains. “Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, ‘cultural communities’ don’t require, or warrant, their own states.”
Discussing several other instances of the removed content, the report emphasizes that the “shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream” influences public opinion and presents radical Islam favorably.
