House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
thehill.com
thehill.com
There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a discussion, which they are not.
And remember even if the investigation (which is a farce) goes nowhere, allowing it to exist unchallenged means that some people are going to be harassed and intimidated. But, that too is the point, fear is what they want.
Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like lowering prices for everyday Americans instead of running up baseless legal bills?
I imagine the way it normal goes is first they ask nicely and if you say no then they formally supeona you.
It’s not a partisan fight, it’s a fight over whether or not nations, parties, or groups have a right to re-author reality through data to fit their desires.
Roy Cohn was Trump's mentor after all.
All of Trump’s seemingly irrational decisions are his emotionally rational pursuit of forcing people to submit, just like his dad did to him [0]. Like a lot of boomers scarred by untreated trauma, that’s what he understands respect to be: submission. It was wrong then, and wrong now, but attacking Trump, while intuitive, is the wrong way to engage him.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/07/donald-trump...
Have any of those things happened here? Whose rights have been violated? Oh and people routinely get dragged in front of Congress by both parties for grandstanding purposes and nothing comes of it. Perhaps something to keep in mind when using scary words.
Your personal, ad hoc definition of McCarthyism is no better than any other. Generally, McCarthyism is persecution of people because of their ideas, because of wrongthink, which is the case here.
> Oh and people routinely get dragged in front of Congress by both parties for grandstanding purposes and nothing comes of it.
That's not an argument. Yes, many appear before Congress as was the case during McCarty too, but only some of those appearances, then and now, can be qualified as McCarthyism.
Let me underline that "nothing comes of it" is wrong on several levels - first, wrongthink persecution always has consequences - at the very least, the target organization or individual are put on the defensive, stressed and strained for resources while the persecutors have no such constraints.
Second, sometimes more serious consequences do "come out of it" which is not reflected at all in your argument. The most salient lesson in McCarthyism is that it caught roots in the US (something thought to be impossible) and for how long it dragged along. Therefore anything that even slightly looks like McCarthyism must be called out lest we slide down the slippery slope again. Trying to hide risks that are clearly manifested in history isn't fair play.
> Perhaps something to keep in mind when using scary words.
Perhaps it's better to keep in mind that one shouldn't be scared of words and should try to understand them instead.
Even trivial topics can attract die-hards who refuse to let an article say something they don’t like.
Wikipedia also seeks to have a similar problem to StackOverflow where some users have become very good at working their way into the site’s structures and saying the right things to leverage the site’s governance model to their advantage. The couple times I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
What red line are you waiting for before acknowledging that we’re in a dangerous situation (aka headed towards doom)?
I wonder if they have any dedicated compute stateside, tho…
French spooks once detained a randomly-chosen Wikipedia admin and coerced them into using their credentials to delete an article (about French spooks),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)" (2013)—191 comments)
Wikipedia has data centers in Virginia, texas and san francisco. (They also have some in other countries)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Downloading Wikipedia is usually a first step for people getting involved in prepping or data-hoarding communities, because it's so much easier than most other websites, and the utility you get from it is pretty large. And the downloads, while fairly large, will still fit on a typical home computer. There are probably tens of thousands of copies, if not more, floating around.
Whether there is bias or not is entirely immaterial! The government should not be the Ministry of Truth!
There are no laws about bias in political content published by private entities. Because of the Constitution.
And as the very first comment points out, whether there is truth in the charge or not, now there are people saying "A is bad because I read it on the interwebs!" And regardless of where the investigation goes, there will be more comments talking about the good/bad of Wikipedia, and not the good/bad of the US government (or other governments as the case may be.) This is about the 10th post in the past week that suffers from this phonomenon (see the US buying part of Intel posts for an excellent example.)
HN commenters are very very good at missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional. Unfortunately, I think it often isn't.
Either there are objective rules where people can get a benefit out of knowing the ins and outs of them better, or there are no objective rules and decision makers decide things on vibes.
I'd definitely prefer the objective rules case. [Of course in real life its a spectrum and Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle]
> I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
If you think legalese is bad on talk pages, try reading an arbcom case sometime ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Ca... ) its a fascinating pseudo-legal system.
Wikipedia is not an arbitrator of truth: everything needs a reliable, secondary source[0]. This means the content has to be notable enough that a reputable source wrote about it, and you cannot reference things like git commits or research papers (since they don't provide context and most people can't understand them).
If a Wikipedia article does use one of those sources, delete the paragraph. If you get into an Edit war, you'll win.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
But just look at what Trump is doing to the Smithsonian, one example is turning US Slavery History into something even all slaves loved. Or erasing Trump's 2 Impeachments.
You and everyone with even a little bit of smarts knows the articles that will be first targeted is US Slavery History and Trump's multiple Impeachments.
Then it is suddenly "However"
If someone challenges you, you have infinite time due to obsession or being paid. You can then quote a barrage of wikipedia rules until the other side submits.
If whatever side of the "truth" has a time advantage, they will usually win. That's very common on topics that attract the obsessed, and the end result does not usually correlate with reality
Personally, I have seen many articles, esp. of individuals who just before had become publicly visible, re-written drastically enough to cast serious doubt on the objectivity of Wikipedia.
It would appear as a society you can have either foster trust (we may have forgotten how to do this?) or feed a bloated police/surveillance/intel state, but not both?
Am curious about others experiences with these matters!
How it's enforced is a detail. They have the Supreme Court to issue whatever verdict is required.
In fact, the most likely outcome to the House trying to play hardball with Wikipedia is a double-digit percentage increase in their donations. Which I don't think House Republicans mind, because none of this is actually about Wikipedia.
So, again, how is this supposed to work?
Dragging people for public spectacles in Congress, lawfare through frivolous lawsuits, frivolous investigation through a variety of agencies, wasting the orgs time in court, allies doxxing org members to intimidate them with stochastic terrorism.
If you haven't been paying attention to how Trump and Co have been weapoinzing government to silence critics or pressure private orgs, you haven't been paying attention.
What happened to Harvard?
What happened to CBS/Paramount?
What happened with 60 Minutes?
What about ActBlue?
CBS's owners were existentially dependent on DOJ approval of an impending merger.
60 Minutes is a CBS property.
Nothing has happened to ActBlue.
So again I ask: how exactly is the House supposed to accomplish anything with Wikipedia?
is this the right application of your time and energy? perhaps that time and energy is more usefully spent fighting against the actively malicious current US political administration, than deconstructing arguments in that same vein?
Likewise, they'll just make shit up or use some tiny administrative technicality against Wikipedia.
There is nothing at all connecting the administration to Wikipedia. People are falling for an op the GOP is running.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250807-us-to-rewrite...
Depends what you mean. It also plays in to Trump's "tough on crime" message, which appeals to a fairly broad group of voters. It also appeals to MAGA fanatics who seem to delight in most things that anger "libs".
(To be clear, there is also pro-Palestine, too, though certainly less organized.)
Also, RIP Wikipedia Review which, though it went downhill later, was an amazing source of revealing corruption in the Wikipedia bureacracy, cabalizing and literal secret mailing lists to coordinate protection of viewpoints, including pro-Israel, from the admins.
Something similar to their targeted of US Univerities/Colledes for anti-semitism and for being "woke." Trump has threatened the Harvard endowment, its ability to enrol foreign students, federal research funding, among others.
As a charity they are tax exempt - that could be revoked. The US government could declare them to be a foreign influence operation and require them to register as foreign agents. They could add a requirement that everyone on Wikipedia must declare who they are before editing. They could restrict various pages from being displayed in the US. They could even block or even cease the domain if they wanted to play hardball.
Do not underestimate the levers of pressure that could be deployed here.
The Trump admin was very creative when it came to Harvard and figured out many different pressure points to push all at once. Don't expect it to be too simple. The guys running this have thought about avoiding the easy dismissal: https://www.ortecfinance.com/en/about-ortec-finance/news-and...
Just look at how the recent flag burning EO was worded in order to get around 1A concerns.
The Wikimedia Foundation does not depend on US government funding and even if the US somehow made life difficult for donors, they are sitting on a substantial endowment fund that can float them for a long time.
And at some point, if the harassment gets to be too much, Wikimedia can just up and leave. There's no reason that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to be headquartered in San Francisco, it could just as easily be in Oslo or Paris. That's a huge advantage that Harvard didn't have.
If Trump wants Wikipedia gone he'll just sue them or open an investigation that never needs to ever go before a judge. Then in return for dropping the suit/investigation all they need to do is make sure that a friend of MAGA sits on the board and can make sure that certain edits get approved and others don't.
People who are surprised by this or still assuming that he can't/won't do something because of the law or norms or "but then the Democrats will do X" need to wake the fuck up.
These people are going to do whatever the fuck they want under whatever justification they can cook up, and they don't fear any repercussions because they are not planning to turn over their new-found power to anyone else.
Do you actually need to be spoon-fed examples?
Not a lawyer tho, and it seems that even with a majority getting something like that through congress would be very difficult.
Then should we remove the 501c3 status of every church, mosque, temple, etc in the U.S. because they are biased towards not just the existence of a god, but the existence of their particular version of god?
> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Based on the track record of the Trump administration, it is unwise to take any of their official letters at face value. This House committee may claim it really wants what is best for American citizens -- and they might actually believe it themselves -- but the dominant motivation has little to do with foreign influence. Rather, I think their primary motivation is to suppress or intimidate dissenters.
If the committee decided that it wanted to systematically investigate foreign influence, that would be a different matter. The differential targeting is quite telling.
About me (in case you want to know my leanings, so you can take them into account): I do not support this letter nor the current administration. That said, I didn't categorically reject the whole idea right away. I read the letter and thought about it. I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring private organizations do certain kinds of foreign actor tracking and reporting, but it has to be done legally and applied fairly.
Finally, I refuse to call this "politics as usual". Yes, sadly, committee investigations are often used as PR stunts. Both parties have done it. What is happening here is orders of magnitude worse to the extent it undermines freedom of speech and attempts to subvert another information source.
[1]: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
>> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Wikipedia is not subsidized by us tax dollars.
But given the way this administration works (looking at their treatment of Universities/Colleges), they will only identify specific types of bias:
- criticism of Republicans
- criticism of Christian conservatism
- pro-LGBTQ+
- criticism of Israel
and try to punish Wikipedia for it, while allowing all other types of bias to flourish.
This isn't that different than the TikTok ban being motivated in Congress by the prevalence of criticism of Israel on TikTok: https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine...
I expect financial sanctions to be threatened. Because Wikipedia is a US-based, it will likely end up in US court like so many of the other Trump policies.
A group of students throwing a tantrum because someone they don’t like was invited to speak?
The most powerful government in the world using every tool it has to make the university whose speech they don’t like suffer? Tools including threatening to remove accreditation, refusing to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, threatening to end the student visas of the international students, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
(Though maybe the actors you're referring to are students rather than the administration. It's true that students can't violate someone's first amendment rights, although they can interfere with their exercise in a way that the administration might have a legal duty to prevent.)
That said, I am a financial supporter of FIRE, which often has come to the defense of free speech of conservatives. It is also opposed to the Trump administrations moves against Harvard:
https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-bl...
Free speech is the right to speak without retribution of the law. It is not the right to be heard or platformed.
For example, if a city council invites a Christian preacher to deliver a sermon, then they also have to allow access to other faiths.
I would rephrase the question as "what kinds of bias systemically point in a particular direction?"
- If by "bias" one means "following the principles set out in Wikipedia's mission" then one probably should ask "Isn't this what non-profits do... and even if that mission is unpopular, a proper government supporting various civil liberties would need a _very_ strong reason to meddle."
- If by "bias" one means that there is a significant percentage of individuals that bring their own personal bias, then one should probably ask:
-- what's the problem with individuals bringing personal bias? -- this is what people do, after all;
-- to what degree does the claimed bias reflect a natural effect of any aggregation of people;
- if the bias is coming from editors, does this matter?
- is Wikipedia breaking some law?... perhaps (seems like a stretch and quite difficult to prove) Wikipedia is doing something illegal when it comes to aggregation that is making the disparate biases "add up" (like vectors) to point in some direction?
Finally, for all of the above, on what basis might the government have a legally-supported basis for acting (whether it be hearings, demands for data, or otherwise)?
A claim that foreign interests are interfering with US elections (by way of platform X) is easy to make, but any official actions from the government must flow from some legal authority. (Practically speaking, ultimately a citation from the U.S. legal code, Constitution, or Supreme Court.)
Expansions, criticisms, etc always welcome.
Also worth noting that The Hill itself has fired at least 2 journalists over their criticisms of Israel.
On that basis - should there also be an investigation into https://www.mikejohnsonforlouisiana.com/ ? He is the Speaker of the House, and it would be incredibly easy for some of his taxpayer-paid staff to do stuff, with the objective of influencing U.S. public opinion...
> 1.Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination by nation state actors in editing activities on Wikipedia.
> 2. Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies.
> 3. Records of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) including but not limited to all editor conduct disputes and actions taken against them.
> 4. Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by ArbCom.
> 5. Documentation of Wikipedia’s editorial policies and protocols including those aimed at ensuring neutrality and addressing bias as well as policies regarding discipline for violations.
> 6. Any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by a third-party acting on its behalf) of patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel.
---
IP adress of users who have gotten in trouble with arbcom is quite concerning. That could make people be afraid of contributing to controversial topics in case their IP ends up in US government hands. Definitely a chilling effect.
Peaceful, sustained, popular, legal, loud resistance is necessary to push back against an administration that is trying to kneecap influential dissenting viewpoints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Which calling it that, is of course a huge issue for all the zionist genocide deniers (both liberals and conservatives).
And there it is. The reason.
Do they have some kind of blackmail on people? It’s almost as if they had an operative throwing parties and video taping the depraved acts of people in power.
Biased towards sanity while the government and a significant part of this country is biased in the opposite direction.
No wonder they're afraid.
Republicans are ruining EVERYTHING.
"Investigate" means "harass." There's no intent to do any fact-finding.
"Allegations" means "baseless accusations." Trump often employs the tactic of saying "people say" and then say something nobody has ever said before. It's a rhetorical device - appeal to anonymous authority - used to make people think this thought is widespread when it isn't.
Maybe Wikipedia should start blocking states the congress people asking for this investigation are from with a big banner saying "Your congress person wants us to push Trump Lies, so this site is blocked from your state until this investigation ends".
Then maybe these people understand what real bias looks like.
/s
Meanwhile: Hey EU, regulating our friedly corporate donors, means you harm their freedom of speech !!!!!!!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
One of the many reasons I don’t donate to Wikipedia. To keep this page up is to continue fueling unnecessary culture wars. Which in my opinion doesn’t align with their mission as it is not knowlege but an attack:
> Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge.
Where is the Bush Derangement Syndrome? Where is the Biden Derangement Syndrome? Arguably this page owes everything to Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Wikipedia exists in the context of the real world. All it does is reflect it. Deal with it.
Edit: Also as someone else pointed out the page describes the origin of the term as evolving out of Bush Derangement syndrome being coined in 2003 and even comments on a Thatcher Derangement Syndrome phrase used after her death. The Trump Derangement Syndrome appears to be the main article because of the actual usage by government and in legislation
I'd say not everybody was paying attention at the time, but these syndromes defintely exist, it's just that no former President actually did what it takes to reach this level of regard.
All kinds of people agree that Trump can not be matched in a number of ways, conservatves, progressives, independents, whether they are deranged or not.
With any syndrome it does take a lot of consenus but eventually it's foolish to deny.
Every Presdient has it, some are just more prominent and widely recognized than others.
Edit: not my downvote BTW
That article makes sure to mention that Trump derangement syndrome is a logical fallacy in the first paragraph. They aren't fueling culture wars by being an information source. I'm not sure where the bias would be coming from here with this article, and on which side and to whom...
What knowledge does this page offer beyond indicating a cultural logical fallacy and listing a bunch of hypocrisy that can also be found on Trump’s main wikipedia page? What is so significantly different about TDS from Bush Derangement Syndrome that it needs it’s own page?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_George_W._Bu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_con...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...
Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. How their biased viewpoints get amplified globally is a huge problem on top of that.