For years, Israel warned that online “neutrality” was a myth. Now even Wikipedia’s own founders admit it — the world’s largest encyclopedia is no longer neutral, and its coverage of Israel has been captured by a coordinated network of anti-Israel activists.
What billions read each day about Israel — from the Gaza war to antisemitism — is being shaped not by experts, but by ideologically driven editors who weaponize the platform to push propaganda and silence balance.
How Wikipedia Lost Its Neutrality
Wikipedia’s open-source model has always been both its strength and its weakness. Anyone can edit nearly any page, instantly. That openness made it a revolutionary tool for collective knowledge — but it also left the site wide open to manipulation.
According to a November 2025 report from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a group of roughly 40 editors operating through a Discord channel called Tech for Palestine coordinated efforts to rewrite pages about Israel and Hamas. They systematically removed references to Hamas terrorism, downgraded Israeli sources, and redefined Zionism as “colonialism.”
Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir of INSS called it plainly: “The dominant presence of anti-Israeli editors makes it a tool that produces a one-sided narrative.”
The Moment Everything Broke
On November 3, 2025, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales personally stepped in — freezing edits to the “Gaza genocide” article and labeling it an “egregious” breach of neutrality. (New York Post, Nov. 3 2025; Ynet, Nov. 3 2025.)
His intervention followed months of internal chaos. Earlier in the year, the platform’s own Arbitration Committee banned eight editors for “disruptive editing” amid mounting complaints of “widespread anti-Israel bias.” (Times of Israel, Feb. 1 2025.)
What forced Wales’s hand was not a single bad edit but a pattern: an organized, ideologically motivated group twisting information on one of the most sensitive conflicts in the world — and doing so under Wikipedia’s trusted brand.
Propaganda in Plain Sight
Investigators at BrightMind History tracked dozens of examples showing how far the bias runs. Among them:
• The renaming of the “Hamas–Israel War” to the “Gaza War,” obscuring that Hamas launched the October 7 attacks.
• Labeling Israeli academic and government sources as “unreliable” on antisemitism.
• Publishing articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
• Hosting a “Weaponization of Antisemitism” page that implies Jews exploit antisemitism for political gain. (BrightMind History, Aug. 28 2025.)
Such distortions echo the language of Hamas propaganda — not impartial reporting.
Even the Founders Are Alarmed
Wikipedia’s second co-founder Larry Sanger has been warning for years that the platform has drifted into ideological capture. In a 2025 interview with Epoch Times, he stated: “Wikipedia has gone hard left and no longer strives for neutrality.”
That statement — from the man who helped build Wikipedia — shows just how deep the problem runs. This is not a debate about “different perspectives.” It’s about a massive global information source being used to normalize antisemitic tropes and erase Israeli legitimacy.
The Bigger Picture
This controversy goes beyond Israel. When a handful of anonymous editors can control what the world believes about war, history, and terrorism, democracy itself is at risk. The promise of open knowledge has been replaced by a digital oligarchy — one that decides which truths are allowed to exist.
Israel sounded the alarm first. Now the very people who built Wikipedia are admitting the same thing: neutrality online is an illusion, and the bias against Israel is not imagined — it’s systemic.
